ThetaBurst

The headline in the Times on this article is actually: "Next Up for the Democrats: Civil War" but, I like mine, better.


And now, Frank Rich:



WHAT if a presidential candidate held what she billed as “the largest, most interactive town hall in political history” on national television, and no one noticed?

The untold story in the run-up to Super Tuesday was Hillary Clinton’s elaborate live prime-time special the night before the vote. Presiding from a studio in New York, the candidate took questions from audiences in 21 other cities. She had plugged the event four days earlier in the last gasp of her debate with Barack Obama and paid a small fortune for it: an hour of time on the Hallmark Channel plus satellite TV hookups for the assemblies of supporters stretching from coast to coast.

The same news media that constantly revisited the Oprah-Caroline-Maria rally in California ignored “Voices Across America: A National Town Hall.” The Clinton campaign would no doubt attribute this to press bias, but it scrupulously designed the event to avoid making news. Like the scripted “Ask President Bush” sessions during the 2004 campaign, this town hall seemed to unfold in Stepford. The anodyne questions (“What else would you do to help take care of our veterans?”) merely cued up laundry lists of talking points. Some in attendance appeared to trance out.

But I’m glad I watched every minute, right up until Mrs. Clinton was abruptly cut off in midsentence so Hallmark could resume its previously scheduled programming (a movie promising “A Season for Miracles,” aptly enough). However boring, this show was a dramatic encapsulation of how a once-invincible candidate ended up in a dead heat, crippled by poll-tested corporate packaging that markets her as a synthetic product leeched of most human qualities. What’s more, it offered a naked preview of how nastily the Clintons will fight, whatever the collateral damage to the Democratic Party, in the endgame to come.

For a campaign that began with tightly monitored Web “chats” and then planted questions at its earlier town-hall meetings, a Bush-style pseudo-event like the Hallmark special is nothing new, of course. What’s remarkable is that instead of learning from these mistakes, Mrs. Clinton’s handlers keep doubling down.

Less than two weeks ago she was airlifted into her own, less effective version of “Mission Accomplished.” Instead of declaring faux victory in Iraq, she starred in a made-for-television rally declaring faux victory in a Florida primary that was held in defiance of party rules, involved no campaigning and awarded no delegates. As Andrea Mitchell of NBC News said, it was “the Potemkin village of victory celebrations.”

The Hallmark show, enacted on an anachronistic studio set that looked like a deliberate throwback to the good old days of 1992, was equally desperate. If the point was to generate donations or excitement, the effect was the reverse. A campaign operative, speaking on MSNBC, claimed that 250,000 viewers had seen an online incarnation of the event in addition to “who knows how many” Hallmark channel viewers. Who knows, indeed? What we do know is that by then the “Yes We Can” Obama video fronted by the hip-hop vocalist will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas had been averaging roughly a million YouTube views a day. (Cost to the Obama campaign: zero.)

Two days after her town-hall extravaganza, Mrs. Clinton revealed the $5 million loan she had made to her own campaign to survive a month in which the Obama operation had raised $32 million to her $13.5 million. That poignant confession led to a spike in contributions that Mr. Obama also topped. Though Tuesday was largely a draw in popular votes and delegates, every other indicator, from the candidates’ real and virtual crowds to hard cash, points to a steadily widening Obama-Clinton gap. The Clinton campaign might be an imploding Potemkin village itself were it not for the fungible profits from Bill Clinton’s murky post-presidency business deals. (The Clintons, unlike Mr. Obama, have not released their income-tax returns.)

The campaign’s other most potent form of currency remains its thick deck of race cards. This was all too apparent in the Hallmark show. In its carefully calibrated cross section of geographically and demographically diverse cast members — young, old, one gay man, one vet, two union members — African-Americans were reduced to also-rans. One black woman, the former TV correspondent Carole Simpson, was given the servile role of the meeting’s nominal moderator, Ed McMahon to Mrs. Clinton’s top banana. Scattered black faces could be seen in the audience. But in the entire televised hour, there was not a single African-American questioner, whether to toss a softball or ask about the Clintons’ own recent misadventures in racial politics.

The Clinton camp does not leave such matters to chance. This decision was a cold, political cost-benefit calculus. In October, seven months after the two candidates’ dueling church perorations in Selma, USA Today found Hillary Clinton leading Mr. Obama among African-American Democrats by a margin of 62 percent to 34 percent. But once black voters met Mr. Obama and started to gravitate toward him, Bill Clinton and the campaign’s other surrogates stopped caring about what African-Americans thought. In an effort to scare off white voters, Mr. Obama was ghettoized as a cocaine user (by the chief Clinton strategist, Mark Penn, among others), “the black candidate” (as Clinton strategists told the Associated Press) and Jesse Jackson redux (by Mr. Clinton himself).

The result? Black America has largely deserted the Clintons. In her California primary victory, Mrs. Clinton drew only 19 percent of the black vote. The campaign saw this coming and so saw no percentage in bestowing precious minutes of prime-time television on African-American queries.

That time went instead to the Hispanic population that was still in play in Super Tuesday’s voting in the West. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles had a cameo, and one of the satellite meetings was held in the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s smart politics, especially since Mr. Obama has been behind the curve in wooing this constituency.

But the wholesale substitution of Hispanics for blacks on the Hallmark show is tainted by a creepy racial back story. Last month a Hispanic pollster employed by the Clinton campaign pitted the two groups against each other by telling The New Yorker that Hispanic voters have “not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.” Mrs. Clinton then seconded the motion by telling Tim Russert in a debate that her pollster was “making a historical statement.”

It wasn’t an accurate statement, historical or otherwise. It was a lie, and a bigoted lie at that, given that it branded Hispanics, a group as heterogeneous as any other, as monolithic racists. As the columnist Gregory Rodriguez pointed out in The Los Angeles Times, all three black members of Congress in that city won in heavily Latino districts; black mayors as various as David Dinkins in New York in the 1980s and Ron Kirk in Dallas in the 1990s received more than 70 percent of the Hispanic vote. The real point of the Clinton campaign’s decision to sow misinformation and racial division, Mr. Rodriguez concluded, was to “undermine one of Obama’s central selling points, that he can build bridges and unite Americans of all types.”

If that was the intent, it didn’t work. Mrs. Clinton did pile up her expected large margin among Latino voters in California. But her tight grip on that electorate is loosening. Mr. Obama, who captured only 26 percent of Hispanic voters in Nevada last month, did better than that in every state on Tuesday, reaching 41 percent in Arizona and 53 percent in Connecticut. Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign’s attempt to drive white voters away from Mr. Obama by playing the race card has backfired. His white vote tally rises every week. Though Mrs. Clinton won California by almost 10 percentage points, among whites she beat Mr. Obama by only 3 points.

The question now is how much more racial friction the Clinton campaign will gin up if its Hispanic support starts to erode in Texas, whose March 4 vote it sees as its latest firewall. Clearly it will stop at little. That’s why you now hear Clinton operatives talk ever more brazenly about trying to reverse party rulings so that they can hijack 366 ghost delegates from Florida and the other rogue primary, Michigan, where Mr. Obama wasn’t even on the ballot. So much for Mrs. Clinton’s assurance on New Hampshire Public Radio last fall that it didn’t matter if she alone kept her name on the Michigan ballot because the vote “is not going to count for anything.”

Last month, two eminent African-American historians who have served in government, Mary Frances Berry (in the Carter and Clinton years) and Roger Wilkins (in the Johnson administration), wrote Howard Dean, the Democrats’ chairman, to warn him of the perils of that credentials fight. Last week, Mr. Dean became sufficiently alarmed to propose brokering an “arrangement” if a clear-cut victory by one candidate hasn’t rendered the issue moot by the spring. But does anyone seriously believe that Howard Dean can deter a Clinton combine so ruthless that it risked shredding three decades of mutual affection with black America to win a primary?

A race-tinged brawl at the convention, some nine weeks before Election Day, will not be a Hallmark moment. As Mr. Wilkins reiterated to me last week, it will be a flashback to the Democratic civil war of 1968, a suicide for the party no matter which victor ends up holding the rancid spoils.


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/op...in&oref=slogin

HarperLee

But does anyone seriously believe that Howard Dean can deter a Clinton combine so ruthless that it risked shredding three decades of mutual affection with black America to win a primary?


Frank Rich says it all and says it well.

Teri B.

The Washinton Monthly
February 10, 2008
By Kevin Drum

FRANK RICH....I've never quite understood Frank Rich's popularity among liberals. He's always struck me as a guy who has an OK prose style but otherwise does little except regurgitate conventional lefty wisdom at far greater length than it deserves. And when it comes to the Clintons, he's completely unhinged. Check out today's column where he complains about Hillary's pre-election special on the Hallmark channel:

So Hillary chooses a black woman to moderate the show and Rich insists that what she's really doing is putting her in a "servile role"? Jeebus. The guy's got a serious screw loose. And the rest of the column is no better, just a 1,500 word harangue of tired anti-Hillary screechiness. Andrew Sullivan probably loves it, but why would anyone else want to read this nonsense?

The Washington Monthly

Teri B.

Frank Rich

The Butcher of the Beltway.
By Bryan Curtis
Posted Monday, Dec. 12, 2005, at 6:52 PM ET

In New York, Times columnist Frank Rich is a local hero. If he lacks the national profile of Times stars Maureen Dowd and David Brooks, and the liberal bloodlust of Paul Krugman, then his column is nonetheless a beloved Manhattan institution. Part of it is that Rich is a genuine New York celebrity, dating from when he was the Times' chief drama critic, the celebrated "Butcher of Broadway." And part of it is that the critical voice Rich honed on the theater beat, and now uses in his column, is perfectly tuned to the voice of Manhattan liberalism. In Rich's column you hear the mantra of the Upper West Side: a despair at the current liberal predicament, leavened by self-righteousness. "The answer is not complicated," Rich wrote last month. "When people in power get away with telling bigger and bigger lies, they naturally think they can keep getting away with it. And for a long time, Mr. Bush and his cronies did. Not anymore."

A few weeks ago, I went to see Rich among the faithful, giving a talk at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. Each year, the 92nd Street Y brings in a roster of eminences, from Alan Alda to Barbara Boxer, designed to draw out the old lions of Manhattan liberalism. A sign of Rich's star power is that tickets for his "evening with" had sold out well in advance, as they do every time he visits the Y. The lobby had the giddy buzz of a rock concert, and I spotted an elderly woman, suffering from age or just desperation to see her hero, attempt twice to sneak into the auditorium without a ticket. Inside, the audience hung on Rich's every word, nodding vigorously when he skewered George W. Bush ("I think he has lost the trust of the country") and resignedly when he skewered the Democrats ("I think the Democrats are pathetic"). Within a half-hour the synchronous head-bobbing had reached a level achieved only by a few rock acts; I imagine the aging ladies in the front row were ready to pelt Rich with their underwear, if only they had been able to stand.

The role of lefty hero is essentially Rich's third act in journalism. In 1994, after 14 high-octane years as drama critic, Rich began to write what you might call cultural op-eds. In these, Rich would stroke his chin about Oprah Winfrey's Beloved or David Hare's The Blue Room—each cultural exemplum supposedly containing clues to desires of the polity. The theorizing had its limits—what, in the end, did Beloved tell us about society? (And Rich has unfortunately produced a crowd of imitators, including Dowd at the Times.) But Rich also had his share of triumphs. In 2003, after moving his column to the "Arts & Leisure" section, he was one of the first journalists to call Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ anti-Semitic. Played out in print and on TV, the Gibson-Rich feud both anticipated the cultural rift of the 2004 presidential election and was sensationally entertaining to boot. After Gibson expressed his desire to see the columnist killed along with his dog, Rich deadpanned, "I don't have a dog."

Since returning to the op-ed page in April, Rich has transformed himself into a more conventional left-wing animal. Gone is the snarky, channel-surfing sociologist; in is the defiant liberal champion who produces headlines like "Dishonest, Reprehensible, Corrupt" (Nov. 27), "The Mysterious Death of Pat Tillman" (Nov. 7), and "Karl and Scooter's Excellent Adventure" (Oct. 23). The column remains about the culture only in its shocked discovery, two weeks out of three, that some evangelical supporters of the GOP do not admire gay people, artists, or Jews.

What is Rich's niche? Though he grew up in Washington, D.C., Rich does not aspire to the capitolesque wonkery of David Brooks or the savage caricatures of Maureen Dowd. Nor is he a big-ideas man, like globalism evangelist Thomas L. Friedman. Rich's methodology is more like a blogger's—he gathers up a week's worth of lefty outrage. An inveterate media junkie, Rich harvests morsels from the Huffington Post, Daily Kos, the New Republic, Slate, newspapers, and cable-news channels (always with generous citations). He fashions these small thoughts into a sprawling 1,500-word polemic—a sort of liberal call-to-arms. What Rich brings to the mix are muscular adjectives—"odious image-mongering," "sordid shared past"—and the willingness (one might say brazenness) to draw connections between the various GOP outrages. Rarely in his recent columns has Rich been able to write about just one appalling GOP scandal. He has assured readers that Bush's botched response to the New Orleans flood is tied to his botched prosecution of the Iraq war; that the Tyco scandal is really about the corrupt culture of K Street; that the Plamegate scandal is really about WMD—as he puts it, "There are no coincidences."

As someone who shares Rich's politics and appreciates his bruising style, I find his column to be a strangely unsatisfying experience. For sure, there's a small thrill in watching Rich turn the decaffeinated Times op-ed page into an outlet for liberal id. But it's possible to cheer on Rich's crusades and feel that his column leaves you short. Rarely does he offer much more than illuminating rage. It's the kind of closed-minded liberalism that, at its heart, is the antithesis of liberalism.

In some sense, Rich is still operating as the Times' chief drama critic. He doesn't cover politics as theater—he leaves that to Dowd—but he approaches his work with a similar mandate. If you think back to Rich's Broadway tenure, from Cats to Angels in America, his reviews are not especially memorable. It's his advocacy that sticks in memory—his willingness to insist that you must see 'night, Mother, that you mustn't see Merlin, etc. In the 1980s, interest in Broadway fare dwindled to such a degree that what Times readers wanted from their theater critic was the force of an Ebert-like thumb. Similarly, while some New Yorkers may balk at the intricacies of national politics—which so rarely penetrate the heat shield of Manhattan, anyway—they crave the issuance of a crisp verdict. "There were no weapons of mass destruction," Rich wrote in October. "There was no collaboration between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda on 9/11. There was scant Pentagon planning for securing the peace should bad stuff happen after America invaded." Now that that's settled, shall we all go to the theater?

One of Rich's colleagues offered me a theory about his place in the Times universe. The writer said that whatever grief the Times catches for being too liberal is counterbalanced by the grief its New York-based correspondents get for not being liberal enough. New Yorkers assume most Timesmen share their lefty political inclinations but are too constrained by balance and integrity to smear it all over the news pages. Therefore, it is the opinion pages—Rich and Krugman's columns in particular—where they turn for reaffirmation. It's a kind of airtight ideological bunker that, under slightly different circumstances, would make for a great Frank Rich column.

ThetaBurst

Teri B.

"Staggering," isn't, what you can get when you copy and past from the op ed comments.


This one's my favorite:


But this one's a close second:

There are nearly 700 more if anyone's interested.

Article Comments - The New York Times

ThetaBurst

Yeah, I'm interested.

I'm interested in how you never respond to criticisms presented to your commentaries and, instead, issue an "infraction" when something doesn't go your way. That's staggering.