Tom Watson

The Politics of Dope

It just looks bad - eight men versus one woman in the MSNBC Debate on Hillary Clinton tonight. It just looks bad. The strange, manic, almost desperate set-up by Tim Russert and Brian Williams. The scripted, agreed-in-advance questions (wink, wink) all about Clinton, little green softballs to the other Democratic candidates. They've all bought into it. The one topic of the evening? Hillary Clinton.

Sure, other front-runners have faced the increased scrutiny as they broke away in the polls. But I can't remember a debate where the front-runner was literally the topic, where there was a silent agreement among eight men to go after one person with such a single-mindedness. The skin-crawl factor was high.

The fix was in, of course. It's very obvious that the Edwards and Obama campaigns colluded with the "newsmen" on how this debate would go down; hell, they did it through the press, on the front page of The New York Times and in the crossfire on Hardball (wait, is that a mixed metaphor for talking heads?).

And then there's the self-respect factor. How can accomplished men like Obama and Edwards buy into the theme, as if their very candidacies are mere marginalities to Clinton's existence - as if they exist only to provide cable TV rebuttal to her inevitability, like extras in some made-for-television war flick, with their issues and positions just prop cudgels. Yuck.

Then there's this: she stood in well, and dominated. The strange and slimy format only made a strong candidate stronger. Still, the Democrats need shower.

UPDATE: Taylor Marsh calls it the pre-planned mugging it was, and suggests Clinton got immigration right (though perhaps clumsily) with regards to Congressional inaction. And she took level aim at colluder-in-chief Tim Russert:

Russert's goal was to provide the headlines the media was salivating to see. He intended to diminish and discredit Hillary Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner, using her former president husband Bill Clinton to help do the job, which included a document waving drama that was all for show. I'd say Russert has a problem with a woman being president, but that can't be the case. Nah, he was just doing his job.

In a column headlined "Ganging Up," WaPo's Howard Kurtz accused the media and moderator of scripting an attack on Senator Clinton - and chastised Obama and Edwards for getting sucked in:

Barack Obama was getting all kinds of advice from pundits and bloggers heading into last night's Brian Williams/Tim Russert debate, and the gist of it is:

Attack Hillary. Slam her. Beat her. Whack her with a frying pan. Kick her. Whip her. You do want to be president, don't you?

Commentators are geniuses, as we all know, and much smarter than campaign managers. So they must be right about this. Of course, if it backfires, and Obama is seen as abandoning his high-road appeal and becoming just another attack-dog pol, they will be the first to criticize him for that, too.

The Hill's Peter Fenn - no Hillary fan - agrees the mugging only elevated Clinton:

Well, at least the guys didn’t put a “Kick Me” sign on Hillary’s back. In fact, they probably did her a favor. Undoubtedly, many will feel she is being victimized. Again. This time it’s by the yapping from the other members of her pack, who, in the process, have appointed her the Alpha Female.

This is in spite of the fact that her answers to difficult questions are evasive and never off the scripted message, and that some of her Senate votes are highly questionable, along with public and private statements that seem to be inconsistent and expedient.

But when these questions come from opponents from her party who have one main theme — “Get Hillary” — they simply elevate her and lower them.

And from the always-entertaining Daily Howler:

...in fact, the optics were pitiful. It was sad to see that Obama and Edwards would take part in such a Salem witch-dunk; of all the boys who stood on the stage, only Richardson had the decency to announce that he wouldn’t be part of it. (God bless the occasional man who stands up and says he won’t do this.)... At any rate, the “men” did go after Clinton last night—holding hands like blubbering babies, looking like frightened, wet-legged boys. Brian and Tim and Barack and John learned an inspiring lesson last night—if the four hold hands and help each other, they can work up their courage to dunk the vile witch.

From Real Clear Politics blogger Jay Cost, a conservative:

In the first two segments, I counted thirty-three questions. Twenty-two of them were designed to facilitate either another candidate attacking Hillary Clinton, or Clinton responding to attacks (either from another candidate or from Russert). Indeed, all of the major subjects were structured around attacks on Clinton....Afterwards, I could only stomach so much post-debate "analysis." Before I had to walk away from the TV to find the Tums, I watched in amazement as Chris Matthews interviewed Joe Biden and Chris Dodd - and talked about nothing more than Hillary Clinton.

UPDATE II: One more point. When John Cole and Jane Hamsher agree with you (and you've tangled with both of 'em before - and man, they're tough street fighters) you know you've tapped a vein of the good stuff. First Jane:

The hammering she took from her competitors last night in the debate is not available to her as a means of fighting back. The Mighty Wurlitzer would instantly seize the opportunity to cast her as “cold” and “hostile,” it would leap into the main stream media and that would be that. Her opponents took advantage of that fact. As scarecrow noted this morning, it wasn’t a particularly high water mark in the race. And yet, she’s the one who had the courage to try to defend Eliot Spitzer last night (and more forcefully today), despite the fact that he’s politically toxic at the moment and she knew she’d only take shit for it. Her opponents decided to seize the opportunity to attack her rather than defend Spitzer, and now the media is circling and calling her “shrill.”

And now Mr. Cole, a conservative who (we learned) has formally renounced the Republican Party for a Democratic registration (good on him):

I have only been a Democrat for just a few hours, and already I feel the need to defend Hillary.  Brace yourselves....I understand the need for the candidates to put pressure on Clinton, and believe me, I am one of the foremost believers that Hillary will say or do anything to get elected. But in this case, the pressure Dodd and Obama are putting on Clinton is not only unfair, it is simplistic and stupid and plays right into the narrative the idiots in the media love to tell (and I can guarantee they will)....the Democrats were too overzealous in their attacks on Hillary. The simple fact of the matter is there is no good answer to the mess of illegal immigration, Spitzer is trying to do something, anything, to gain some order, and Hillary may not like it (I certainly don’t), but recognizes the value in what he is attempting to do. That isn’t double-talk or flip-flopping. It is called dealing with reality. And if you have a better idea to deal with Spitzer’s problem, by all means, spit it up.

Reading List

Some links outside the cozy confines of this blog to some other stuff I've been working on, involved in, or peripherally tied to:

• Newsweek's Brian Braiker has a piece on "Facebook Philanthropy," a topic I've been interested in since the beginning on the year. Brian focuses on the Causes app that's raising money (tiny) and attention (huge) for causes, and he quotes me as saying the young wired demographic "wears their causes like the way they wear their favorite fashion." True.

 

• Brad Burnham, managing partner of Union Square Ventures (and partner with my old buddy Fred Wilson), graciously gave his post on the Hacking Philanthropy conference he hosted last month to us at onPhilanthropy (where I'm publisher), and we adapted it for our audience of nonprofit professionals. It's very good, and analyzes the effect of capital market forces on philanthropy - please comment on this hot topic.

 

• Speaking of markets and philanthropy, I wrote a piece for onPhilanthropy a couple of weeks ago about a fantastic organization in Kenya that is, in many ways, bringing the philanthropic quotient back to microfinance, which has become big business in recent years: "Jamii Bora (Swahili for “A Better Family”) makes loans to street people, specifically targeting thieves, beggars, prostitutes and the HIV-positive population of Kenya. Yet repayment rates are as high if not higher than some of the big lending programs, and the immediate benefits of lifting the destitute out of poverty are more apparent, said Ingrid Munro, a soft-spoken woman who moved from her native Sweden to Kenya."

 

• You can't get 'em online (alas) but I've also got columns in the current issues of both Contribute and Worth magazines about the confluence of philanthropy and social networking. If I get links eventually, I'll post them but if you catch them in the doctor's office, give them a read and drop me a note.

 

• My longtime partner in crime Jason Chervokas returned to the Silicon Alley beat this week (who'd a thunk it?) with a post in Henry Blodget's Silicon Alley Insider (which I changed my mind on and now read daily) on Halo 3, the best-selling video game for X-Box and his claim that content may again be king. I loved the lead, of course:  "In Silicon Alley's formative years, 'content is king' was the most commonly heard slogan, an article of faith repeated like a mantra from the scruffy tables of Eureka Joe's to the board rooms of media companies uptown. In truth, like the name 'Silicon Alley' itself, 'content is king,' was a phrase we used defensively. Back then we had coder envy. Sure, we clung to the notion of the Internet as a media platform first and a technology platform second, but more than believing it we desperately hoped that it would be so."

 

• Speaking of Silicon Alley, one of its pioneers - the redoubtable Howard Greenstein - joins our lineup of bloggers over at newcritics with a post on (appropriately enough) the geek factor in the new NBC lineup. If anybody knows geek cred, it's Howard. At the same address (and man, I'm really loving the newcritics experience - such a fab crowd), I've got a post on Pete Townshend's masterpiece, Quadrophenia. Pete (I all him that since he posted here last year) is expected in town next week at the Paley Center for the new Who documentary.

Conservative Wildfires: Caused by Environmentalists, Burning Hollywood Liberals, Sparing the Mexicans

Ah, the never-ending ideological schizophrenia of the right-wing media types. Like the Pravda of old, they force every big news event through some bent, warped sieve of political righteousness that twists each headline into some damnation of the treasonous, anti-American left. The Conservative Comintern's lastest game of media twister  is played out on the fire-ravaged ridges of Southern California, where hundreds of thousands of citizens are fleeing for their lives.

This prompted Glenn Beck of CNN - a phrase that in itself should scare every shareholder in the vast Time Warner empire - to root the flames onward:

“I think there is a handful of people who hate America. Unfortunately for them, a lot of them are losing their homes in a forest fire today.”

Yeah, those lefty America-hating schoolkids massed in safety zones like football stadiums in San Diego surrounded by water canons to protect their lives. See, it's a reliably blue state, California. Deserves the burn. And anyway, it's the fault of those no-good "enviro-nitwits" - so says Michele Malkin, who was actually too extreme for FoxNews and lost her battle with Gerald, and her job as a result. She whines that "lawsuits have tied up the president’s Healthy Forests Initiative passed in 2003," basically arguing that you can't have a distrastrous forest fire without, uh, trees. So cut 'em down, tree-huggers:

Environmentalists blame global warming for the problem, but guess who’s standing in the way of a solution?

Maybe it's our neighbors in Mexico (which sent 50 firefighters to help battle the blazes), as some are wondering on that mainstream, super-popular conservative blog FreeRepublic, where one posting today asks that right-wing rhetorical question:

How does the fire know to stop at the mexican border? I’d wager that illegals are lighting them to help out their amigos in getting through.

Jon Swift finds that the ole perfessor of the right - Glenn Reynolds - links approvingly to some blogger manque who goes by the name  Jammie Wearing Fool, who defends the CNN anchor: "It's Beck's opinion that some who hate America live in that area. Is this even debatable?"

Not to Beck, who dug a deeper hole for himself by blaming liberal bloggers for somehow twisting his words:

...unfortunately, some people want to think the worst. But thinking the worst doesn't make it real. Thinking the worst doesn't change an illusion into reality. I just can't believe that I live in a country where I have to explain that.

Which only earned him this epee wound to the chest from swift sword of Digby:

I can't believe I live in a country where anyone who talks like that is paid big bucks to be on the radio and TV.

UPDATE: As John Cole adds: "Hopefully, Glenn Beck is running the numbers and we will know shortly how many of those 1,400 homes deserved to burn."

What Makes You Laugh?

If you live in Cleveland or New York and follow baseball, you can use a few yucks. So newcritics' first-ever blogathon - dedicated to the comedic arts - will certainly appeal to you. So reserve some reading time from November 6-11, as our fave culture site will host an online exchange of one-liners and sitcom memories to coincide with the New York Comedy Festival.

I'm really looking forward to it, partially because it's all being organized by the fab M.A. Peel, a super New York blogger and newcritic and all-around gal about town (when not temporarily hobbled by the mean streets). I'll turn over the description to Ms. Peel:

We are putting out a call for posts that answer this question:

What is the purest comedic moment you have ever experienced?

This blog-a-thon is designed to cut across blog genres: we hope that you film guys will contribute the great movie moments; the lit crit types might regale us with scenes of Evelyn Waugh or Wodehouse that you find brilliant; you tv addicts will kick in the great small screen nuggets, and so on.

We know that to analyze comedy is to kill it, but this is also a personal question--it's your most satisfying moment of experiencing what we collectively call comedy, but which will have a spectrum from the sardonic to slapstick.

Maybe it was at a standup performance, maybe listening to a comedy album, maybe it was at your best friend's wedding. We look forward to hearing about it. And, like Joel McCrae learned at the end of Sullivan's Travels, you never know when a story you share is going to lighten the day for one of your readers.

Send links to [email protected] as you publish, Nov. 6 to 11.(Yes, that's me. Even though I don't have a sense of humor, I am running this thing. Irony I like.)

Newcritics will also be posting an array of comedy-centric pieces all that week.

Global Warming, Local Summer

Kelsey in October waves, originally uploaded by Tom Watson.

School started six weeks ago, and pumpkins adorn many front porch in our neck of the woods. The leaves have turned their golden red hues of autumn. Yards are filled with Halloween decorations and scarecrows. but the weatherman didn't get the memo.

Summer here in lower New York State continues, little more than a week from November. This weekend, our scout troop took our overnight at Hither Hills state park in Montauk, and we'd planned for a chill that never came. [The photo above shows just how summer-like the weather was, and Kelsey took full advantage of the sun and warm surf to swim.] So we sat around and talked about global warming, but we really weren't talking about global warming. We didn't get to carbon emissions, sea levels, and desalinization of the oceans.

We talked about New York and how we've become - by consensus estimate - Virginia, or possibly farther south. The Virginia of our childhoods, that is - because the New York of our childhoods is gone, cilmate-wise. Lakes that froze over in winter don't anymore. Plants don't go dormant that once did. Summer arrives in May and stays toll November, like the south. And we can camp in 75-degree weather in Montauk in late October.

It's amazing to me how climate change has quickly moved from roll-the-eyes wonkspeak to accepted fact of life. Talk this weekend was of the virtual end of the ski industry in the lower Catskills and the mountains of Pennsylvania. And then there are the maple trees in New York State. The trees tell the story.

Turkey Day on Mad Men

Thanksgiving is the appropriate ending date for the initial run of Mad Men, AMC's stylish but strangely unsatisfying period drama. Tomorrow night, we'll bring our live-blogging to a close over a newcritics, a finale of 13 episodes of 1960 pop culture references and suburban-and-office soap opera. Thanksgiving Day, 1960 and the Mad Men gang will feel the pull of the traditional family feast - and the conflict of the never-ending agency bacchanal. Now that Mad Men's been renewed, expect a cliff-hanger. But not in the blogging. We'll wrap it up, call it as we see it, and answer that age-old question - what makes a large group of grown men and women sit in front of the TV, typing would-be witticisms into their computers every Thursday night? At 10 pm, of course. Tomorrow evening. Exclusively at the web's leading culture blog - newcritics.

Modern Buzzcut

After my annual physical this afternoon at the doc's (I should be blogging for some time, thanks) I walked over to the barbershop. Let's just say that what's left was shaggy, like wispy tendrils from a failed plant. In any case, there was a change and in certain areas, I really despise change.

The barbershop is one of those areas. I want it to stay the same - four chairs, tiled floor, sports magazines and the odd Maxim, lollipops for the kids, old manual cash register, and opera on the radio. A group of older Italian men in blue coats. A certain polite quiet, punctuated only by small-talk about the weather or the stock market. A half hour of relative quiet. Okay, okay. An old school place for men, I'll cop to it. Indeed, when it's really quiet there and the Puccini is ascendant, I'll often extend the visit with a shave.

Today, a difference. The last septuagenarian barber has retired. The young guys, who only a few years ago were callow trainees (or so it seems), have taken over. And they've installed a television. Which was blaring loudly when I sat down in the first chair, some teen show on "the CW." A television. What are they thinking? Prices up a buck or two as well.

I got a decent haircut, but there was another difference. When they held up the mirror to show me the back of my head - and their handiwork - at the conclusion of the haircut, the older guys would always angle it a certain way to spare me the increasing shine emanating from the skin-white wattage of my pate. One of life's small courtesies. No more. Today, the glare was in full view.

So I ask you. What's a fella to do in this modern world?

The Liberal Century

One of the great pleasures of being alive and having an Internet connection in these slowly-brightening days is to witness the paroxysms of loathing and dismay coming from the dwindling, punchless right side of the blogosphere. Don't they realize these are the early days of The Liberal Century? Why, even their presidential front runner is a liberal (temporarily masquerading, of course, as a Bible-inspired supply-sider to great hilarity on the circuit) - oh, how that must rub, like a pair of itchy woolen undergarments.

And this morning, when the news broke about the Greatest President Who Never Was - a man who will go down in history as a great American historic figure, unlike the unlanced boil currently in the Oval - and his Nobel Prize. Well, it's almost a higher form of cultural entertainment than the Krazee-Eyez Killa episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

To watch concentration camp lovin' doyenne Michelle Malkin sputter on about the "envirozealots" and reduced to quoting the addled current president of the Czech Republic - she turned to a foies gras gobblin' European for crissakes! - was just a fine appetizer to day that started with rain here in New York and is now flooded with the vitamin D goodness of glorious sunlight.

And oh, the joy of watching the dorks at PajamasMedia roll out a whole bash-the-pitiful-Laureate feed. Hee hee, what dopes! To these lemon-suckers, the former Vice-President has a. a large head (I personally find this offensive, given my titanic gourd), b. an even bigger ego, and c. some kind of weird Euro-centric view of the world that's inherently un-American. Writes one wit: "the former US Vice-President has taken over from Michael Moore as the most sanctimonious lardbutt Yank on the planet." So droll. Says Dr. Sanity - known far and side as "the Samuel Johnson of the Right," which is saying something - contributes this: "I'm amazed. I thought Cindy Sheehan had it all sewn up. Or Hugo Chavez." So very clever.

And so angry. I love their anger. I mean, looooooooove it, baby. Wait'll they get a load of the next inauguration.

I was in a great mood, therefore, when I sauntered - yes, sauntered in the sunshine - across town to the Harvard Club for luncheon with the Grameen Foundation, a great bunch of capitalists if ever I've known one. They honored three deserving awardees for supporting the worldwide revolution in microfinances, one of the crucial tools in fighting global poverty. And there, indeed, was last year's Laureate in the flesh.

Muhammad Yunus congratulated Al Gore with great sincerity, calling global warming "another big issues that needs to have the attention of the world. It needs to be addressed and addressed forcefully."

He was right, and he spoke about the impact of the Nobel Peace Prize and the astounding reach of media in advancing causes like world poverty. Gore's cause is already well-known, of course, but I suspect it's just getting rolling. And it leaves the right-winger stuck in the last century with their sarcasm and their fistful of sand.

***

NOTES: There has been some reaction to the title of this post, which some have taken for a firm prediction of the next 100 years of political life. Linkmeister's comment is correct - it's somewhat ironic and meant to be provocative. That said, I do believe we're moving in a progressive direction; as, over time, the United States has always moved. We go through periods of shrinking reaction, but our liberalism (lowercase, I don't mean a specific political movement of any given time) always wins out. We try and improve ourselves and our society. That self-improvement is, in fact, the American Way in its proper meaning.

On another note, the right-wing commentators are behind their slow-moving government, which in turn is way behind the very industries that filled the Bush-Cheney political coffers. The current administration has taken a foot-dragging slow step into sort of admitting that man-made carbon emissions are damaging the planet. They still refuse to get into the international treaty arena, of course. But that hasn't stopped Republicans like Charlie Crist, the Governor of Florida who succeeded Jeb Bush, from leap-frogging the standard bearer of his own party. At last month's Clinton Global Initiative, Crist and a consortium of energy companies in the south announced a major alternative energy initiative - that's right, the former Democratic president, the Republican Governor of Florida, and southern energy all way ahead of the Bush Administration and pretty firmly in the Al Gore global warming camp. It makes the Pajamas Media buffoons look that much more out of touch.

Finally, I think Jason has it right in his post The Global Warming Wedgie: the right's opposition to regulation on carbon is breaking apart, as major evangelical leaders splinter with their elders and try to save the planet for their kids.

Taconic Style

Franklin Delano Roosevelt still matters in New York State, as anyone who hits the road on an Indian Summer weekend north of the city certainly knows. Yesterday, we took the Taconic State Parkway, created by a commission chaired by FDR as his first foray back into politics after his paralyzing illness and a clear sign of the big shoulders government Roosevelt was to later create.

The Taconic was an extension of the Bronx River Parkway, built by Robert Moses to connect the city to Bear Mountain, and that's where we ended up yesterday, with the temperature in the mid-80s. We hiked down to the zoo and the historic sites by the Bear Mountain Bridge, and on the way back stopped at the surviving redoubt of Fort Clinton, where the British put American soldiers to the bayonet in the hundreds in 1777.

You can see the four-pointed star formation, some the stones laid as walls, and the mounded grass. The mid-Hudson actions of 1777 were a series of failed land battles by the Americans, but they held up the British long enough to prevent the reinforcement of Burgoyne's men at Saratoga and the Crown's effort to split the mutinous colonies along the line of the Hudson failed.

Later, we climbed Perkins Drive (via Honda, not foot) to the summit and once again marveled at the views, and at the hawks circling below us. Bear Mountain is one of those incredible New York State parks - like Jones Beach - that amaze in their very existence as public accommodations. Only liberals create what  lower New York State has in public beauty.

Driving up the Taconic, slicing over toward the Hudson at Peekskill and up and over the Bear Mountain Bridge to the park - then on to West Point or back over to Cold Spring (or in our case, down the Palisades Parkway to the mall, dinner at Johnny Rockets and an hour in the Lego Store with the two boys) is a brilliant reminder of the existence of what I call Taconic Style, that blend of rustic architecture, roadways and parkland that is unique to the Hudson Valley.

The artist and I had our wedding reception on old ferry chugging through the highlands two decades ago, and we sipped champagne will watching the lights twinkle above us at West Point. We return to the highlands at least once a year, and always bring out-of-town visitors to the peaks and vistas of those hills. Today, we were once again the in the Taconic region, but east on Lake Mahopac. For the boys, it was still warm enough to swim and I took a turn in the kayak. Tomorrow's an early one, so we didn't stay late - just long enough for the day to wane, and the lights to glimmer across the lake.

Yes, There Will Be Blogging

Three episodes left - and three episodes only - in the initial run of AMC's hit series Mad Men, and newcritics has blogged them all. We won't let you down tonight. Jammies and swizzle sticks at 10 PM EDT, people - be there at newcritics.