Month: June 2012

The Power Of The Presidency

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

…does not currently extend to persecuting or firing police officers who arrest spoiled, washed-up young starlets who drive while drunk. As Jonathan Turley wryly notes:

It is not clear which actress Amanda Bynes is in greater need of: basic driving or constitutional law lessons. After being arrested for drunk driving, Bynes took to Twitter to ask that President Barack Obama “fire the cop who arrested me.” While Obama may be willing to break away from an emerging civil war in Syria and a worsening economy to address the pressing problems of the starlet, he may find it difficult to fire the officer who is a state employee. However, according to the Justice Department, he does have the ability to declare the officer a threat to the nation and have him summarily executed. After all, if arresting a starlet is not an act of terrorism in our celebrity-driven society, I do not know what is.

I think that Obama may have just a couple of slightly more pressing issues to occupy his attention before he gets around to this particular request.

The End Of America As We Know It? Hardly.

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Andrew Sullivan posts an excellent retort to Mitt Romney’s fear mongering that the United States is about to make a binary flip from being a free enterprise nation to having a “government-run economy”, based on this illuminating chart:

As you will note, the line indicating growth in corporate profits (in billions of dollars) obstinately refuses to go in the direction that it would need to point in order to signify the government-led smothering of the private sector that Romney wants us to believe is currently taking place.

The Republican presidential candidate has been giving speeches bemoaning the notion that President Obama doesn’t understand capitalism or the free enterprise system, and that this ignorance is leading Obama to implement policies that are harming the economic recovery. Romney has advanced this line of attack frequently, most recently at a campaign event in St. Louis, Missouri, though to be fair, he seems willing to ascribe Obama’s supposed failures to ignorance rather than malice:

I do not believe this has been done with evil intent or ill will. But for a family watching their house being sold at foreclosure, or the family that is forced to spend their kid’s college savings just to make ends meet, the results are just as devastating.

Oh wait, perhaps not:

I will not be that President of deception and doubt. I will lead us to a better place.

Then, of course, comes the obligatory lie about Obamacare, the Affordable Healthcare act:

Today, government at all levels consumes 37 percent of the total economy or G.D.P. If Obamacare is allowed to stand, government will reach half of the American economy. And through the increasing controls government has imposed on industries like energy, financial services and automobiles, it will soon effectively control the majority of our economic activity.

This line only works if you are ill-informed enough to actually believe that Obamacare effectively appropriates and nationalises the entire US healthcare industry, bringing it under government ownership as opposed to just regulating the industry to a higher degree and increasing the customer base of the insurance companies through the individual mandate. So it’s basically a big fat lie, though Romney is clever enough to choose his words carefully, stating “government will reach half of the American economy”, a quite meaningless phrase, but one that deliberately and incorrectly suggests ownership and control of half of the US economy without actually putting him on the record as having said so.

And finally, the crux of Romney’s argument:

One must ask whether we will still be a free enterprise nation and whether we will still have economic freedom. America is on the cusp of having a government-run economy. President Obama is transforming America into something very different than the land of the free and the land of opportunity.

We know where that transformation leads. There are other nations that have chosen that path. It leads to chronic high unemployment, crushing debt, and stagnant wages.

I don’t want to transform America; I want to restore the values of economic freedom.

This is what really irritates me about the Romney argument, this idea that there is a binary choice between “free enterprise” and “government-run”, that America has always dwelt on the free enterprise side of the line and that Obama wants an old-school socialist planned economy. It is borne out of the total allergy to nuance or shades of grey currently affecting the Republican party, and is one of the main reasons why I cannot bring myself to support them at the moment.

Of course there is no such binary choice. What percentage of GDP would have to be consumed by government spending for “free enterprise” to officially be declared dead according to the Romney definition? 37%, the current figure? 50% + 1? Something else? All conservatives – myself included – want to see government spending account for as small a proportion of GDP as possible, and most would agree that the current level – in Britain as well as in America – is too high. But the size of government has expanded under both parties, and though Obama may be guilty of failing to reverse the trend, he has at least slowed the rate of increase in the size of government, when the stimulus measures are factored out. For Mitt Romney to suggest that the US is teetering on the brink of becoming a planned economy under Obama when government spending accounts for 37% of GDP is not only the worst type of scaremongering, it also ignores the significant contribution that his own party made to the problem.

And as for this narrative about Obama seeking to “transform” America, to turn it into something unrecognisable from before – while it may be the only narrative that Romney can hope to ride to the White House in November, it is also untrue. Obama is a centre-left politician implementing mostly centre-left policies, some of which would actually have enjoyed a measure of support among Republicans if they had been proposed by a President Bush, Cheney or McCain. But for Romney to get out the vote, he must convince his supporters of something patently untrue, that Obama is a radical, a dangerous subversive trying to alter the fabric of America.

I’m an economic conservative, I believe in a small state and limited government involvement in private markets. But given the choice between someone on the centre left who is making an honest effort along Keynesian lines to solve the economic difficulties facing America and someone on the right who screams “socialism!” where none exists, and who remains in denial about his own side’s complicity in the downturn and the detrimental effect that his policy proposals would have on the recovery, I have to hold my nose and support the centre left guy.

Which is a shame, because it would be nice to have a genuine choice in 2012.

My Turn To Be President

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Politico reports on Jeb Bush’s surprisingly frank confession that he believes 2012 was his “time” to run for the presidency, and that he may now have missed his chance:

“This was probably my time,” Bush told “CBS This Morning,” referring to the ongoing presidential campaign. “There’s a window of opportunity, in life, and for all sorts of reasons.”

 

I think we can all quite happily do without a third member of the Bush dynasty ascending to the presidency and making a mockery of American meritocracy. Thanks for sitting this round out, Jeb.

That said, the Florida Republican doesn’t know whether he ever wants to be president.

“Have you made a decision that you don’t want to be president?” asked CBS host Charlie Rose.

“I have not made that decision,” Bush responded.

Uh-oh.

The BBC Doubles Down

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

The Guardian reports that the BBC is shrugging off the unprecedented levels of criticism of their Diamond Jubilee television coverage with the practiced ease and disinterest of the vast, bloated behemoth of an organisation that it is – one that doesn’t have to generate its £4.2bn annual budget by turning a profit, nor justify the way in which that money is spent.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/jun/06/queens-diamond-jubilee-bbc

In fact, as the chorus of complaints grows louder, it emerges that the BBC executive in charge of the jubilee coverage has actually gone on holiday, and will not be available to answer any of the criticism:

The senior BBC executive responsible for the corporation’s diamond jubilee coverage has been unable to defend the output amid mounting criticism, because he is now on holiday.

BBC Vision director George Entwistle, a leading internal candidate to replace Mark Thompson as director general, went on holiday on Tuesday evening and could not appear on Radio 4’s Today programme on Wednesday to defend the corporation, which has faced criticism from vnewspapers, celebrities and even former executives about its four days of diamond jubilee coverage.

By Wednesday afternoon the BBC had also received 2,425 complaints from viewers and listeners about its diamond jubilee coverage, with the vast majority – 1,830 – about Sunday’s Thames pageant. The BBC said it had also received “lots of positive feedback”.

Though the majority of the complaints centred around the lightweight presenters and their lack of a decent command of their subject matter, the BBC chose to duck this line of criticism altogether, focusing instead on defending itself against a number of other decoy straw man arguments:

A senior BBC source said that this was the biggest outside broadcast of a flotilla ever undertaken, with 80 cameras attempting to film 1,000 boats.

“You cannot rehearse something of this scale and you certainly cannot have a running order or predict monstrous weather,” the insider said.

The source said that senior staff involved in the coverage were too tired to appear on the Today programme: “They had worked flat out and we were unable to put up somebody who knew exactly what they were speaking about.”

Fine, but the cloudy weather, scale of the event and the technical hitches had nothing to do with the fact that you assembled a cast of C-list presenters who between them had less gravitas and knowledge of the unfolding events than the jubilee-themed sick bag that one of them, in her wisdom, decided to promote.

Here’s some news, BBC – just because you caught the attention of 15 million largely captive viewers in the UK doesn’t mean that your coverage was any good. It wasn’t. It was really, really, uncharacteristically bad.

And as an organisation you really need to acknowledge it as such if you want to avoid a similar broadcasting catastrophe when the next big national event rolls around.

How Not To Cover An Election

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

It is very hard to disagree with this damning article from Politico, assessing the current state of cable news in America:

If ever there was a political event to lay bare the partisan ideologies of the cable news media, the Wisconsin recall was it.

MSNBC was blatantly rooting for Tom Barrett to defeat Gov. Scott Walker, even sending union champion Ed Schultz to cover an event with no apologies for the dog he has in the fight. (Earlier tonight, Chris Matthews even told Schultz that if he wasn’t an MSNBC host, he could be head of the AFL-CIO.) When it became clear that Barrett would lose, Schultz looked almost teary eyed. Not long after, the network’s contributors immediately began suggesting that this was, in fact, good news for Obama — who, after all, hadn’t even set foot in Wisconsin — and began attacking Mitt Romney.

Meanwhile, Fox News was blatantly rooting for Gov. Walker, and the moment it became clear that Walker might win, host Sean Hannity called it “a repudiation of big unions,” which did “everything they could do to demonize Scott Walker.” Guest Hugh Hewitt then predicted that, five months from now, Romney would follow Walker just “as Reagan followed Thatcher.” Fox’s Greta Van Susteren later hosted what amounted to a victory celebration for the Republicans.

Given this blatant partisan coverage, it was absolutely impossible to watch either network and weed out any clear understanding of the actual significance of the event, much less what effect it would actually have on the 2012 presidential election.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2012/06/the-worst-night-on-cable-news-125389.html

Out of a mixture of boredom, insomnia and a ravenous (bordering on unhealthy) appetite for US political news, I stayed up until 2AM watching MSNBC’s live coverage of the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall election (MSNBC being the only channel I was able to stream on the internet since our satellite television decided to break at the weekend). And goodness me, the coverage was bad. And by “bad”, I mean really unworthy of a channel that purports to be a television news network rather than a propaganda station.

Don’t get me wrong – I like MSNBC a lot. As the US Republican Party has lurched ever further away from being a centre-right party favouring limited government towards becoming a win-at-all-costs, fear-stoking, hypocritical, economically and historically illiterate party for idiots I have found no small degree of comfort in having my displeasure and frustration validated by the likes of Chris Matthews, Martin Bashir, Rachel Maddow, Al Sharpton and the rest of the MSNBC cast. I think that’s a fine and healthy thing to do in small measures, so long as one does not go too far and close oneself off from divergent opinions and other sources of news. However, at some point – I’m not even precisely sure when – it became okay for news networks to openly cheerlead for certain politicians or parties, not just during the opinion shows but while covering live election events. No pretence at impartiality any more, just open bias toward one or other party throughout the broadcast.

MSNBC dispatched their entertaining and highly watchable anchor Ed Schultz to Wisconsin to cover the results in front of a crowd of union-supporting, pro- Tom Barrett people. After talking up Barrett’s prospects throughout the show, he did not try very hard to conceal his disappointment when Republican incumbent Scott Walker was projected to survive the recall challenge:

 

At this point it really goes without saying that the Fox News team were up to exactly the same type of shenanigans on their network, before and during the voting:

 

Of course.

What exactly is wrong – or detrimental to good ratings – with having a lively, spirited but even-handed broadcast while we wait for the results to come in and a victor to be declared, featuring moderated discussions with people from all sides of the political spectrum (so we actually have a chance to learn something rather than just have our existing prejudices reinforced), which could then segue into the usual partisan bombast, in a separately branded show, once the results were announced?

Look, I get it. Conservatives long perceived a bias in the news networks and took to talk radio to find a place where they could hear their opinions reflected in the coverage. Conservative talk radio was eventually augmented by the Fox News Channel, which became so successful that liberals felt that they also needed a channel of their own, at which point MSNBC was hijacked and directed to “lean forward”. CNN tried to maintain an ideological balance and haemorrhaged viewers as a consequence, supposedly validating the “pick a side” approach taken by the others, and has had to resort to ever more desperate technological gimmicks such as interactive video walls, holographic reports beamed into the studio, and Wolf Blitzer, just to remain competitive. Apparently we want our news delivered to us by people who share our political leanings. I’m all for the free market, so what’s wrong with that? Nothing, really.

Except that aside from doing a disservice to the many excellent television journalists who have gone before, it is just plain tacky to call yourself a news network and then park yourself in front of a bunch of partisan supporters and openly support one candidate over another, before polls close, during a segment that is billed as live election coverage rather than political commentary or opinion piece.

Really, really tacky.