– Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. –

Can any U.S. administration avoid the fate spelled out in the following 12 words? “We were elected to change Washington and we let Washington change us.”

Thus spoke John McCain when he formally accepted the Republican party’s nomination for president last September. He then listed a number of reasons why the party had lost the trust of the American people, including that “some Republicans gave in to the temptations of corruption”.

Those temptations cut across party lines and stem from the relentless rise of a system, over the past three decades, which has given special interest groups enormous influence over policy-making and led to what Robert G. Kaiser, author of a just-published book on lobbying, calls “a kind of ethical rot in the nation’s capital”.

Barack Obama promised to stop that rot in his long campaign for the U.S. presidency but there is reason to wonder whether his rhetoric on the stump is more likely to be translated into action than similar pledges made by every president in recent history.

A day after he took office, Obama issued an executive order to stop the rot. “As of today, lobbyists will be subject to stricter limits than under any other administration in history,” he said in signing the order. “If you are a lobbyist entering my administration, you will not be able to work on matters you lobbied on, or in the agencies you lobbied during the previous two years. When you leave government, you will not be able to lobby my administration for as long as I’m president.”

Except for the exceptions. Tom Daschle, for example, Obama’s nominee for the Health and Human Services portfolio, who was not a registered lobbyist but made more than $5 million advising a variety of clients, including some in health-related industries. (Daschle withdrew over a separate matter; $120,000 in unpaid taxes).

Another exception to the no lobbyist rule: William Lynn, expected to be confirmed as Deputy Defense Secretary soon. Lynn’s career is an example of the “revolving door” through which former government officials walk into corporate offices and lobbying firms that pay them richly to influence their former government colleagues.

Lynn worked as the Pentagon’s chief financial officer from 1997 to 2001 and then joined Raytheon, one of the Pentagon’s most important suppliers, as a registered lobbyist from 2002 to last year. Now, about to walk through the revolving door in the opposite direction, he has promised to recuse himself from dealing with defense projects he lobbied for while working for Raytheon.

CAN OBAMA FIX “A BROKEN SYSTEM”?

So, will Obama change Washington and fix what he calls “a broken system” or will Washington change him?  For those who place high hopes in the new president’s ability to succeed where others have failed, a short trip back in history can provide some perspective. On January 22, 1993, another young president who swept into office on a platform of change signed an executive order on “the strictest ethics rules ever”.

That was Bill Clinton and the rules closely resembled those just announced by Obama.

Clinton’s rules did not curb the growth of what Kaiser calls “a new class in Washington, hustlers who exploited the public policy-making process for profit” and amassed wealth by passing “through the revolving door from public service to the ‘private sector’, the Washington euphemism for the influence-peddling industry.”

The industry is one reason why the United States does not score very well on an international index on corruption compiled annually by Transparency International, a corruption watchdog based in Berlin. The U.S. comes in at number 18, below European and Asian countries ranging from New Zealand and Singapore to Germany and Britain.

In his book (So Damn Much Money, the Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American government), Kaiser ascribes the growth of the system partly to the perennial need for money by congressional candidates to pay for their increasingly expensive election campaigns. In 1974, the average winning campaign for the Senate cost $437,000; by 2006, that had grown to $7.92 million. The cost of winning House campaigns grew from $56,500 to $1.3 million.

Congressmen face re-election every two years, which means they are perpetually on the stump. The money they need for this can be raised from the interest groups and individuals for whom the politician can do favors in the future.

Forty years ago, according to Kaiser, lobbying was done by a small group of lawyers and fixers. Today, it is a multibillion-dollar industry of thousands of people, including nearly 200 ex-senators and congressmen, both Democrats and Republicans. It’s an establishment and a culture that looks change-resistant - presidential promises notwithstanding.

You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com. For previous columns, click here.

Dean Wright is Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Standards. Any opinions are his own.

The president was inaugurated in front of adoring crowds and positive reviews in the media. As the unpopular incumbent sat on the platform with him, the new Democratic chief executive took office as the nation faced a crippling economic crisis. The incoming president was a charismatic figure who had run a brilliant campaign and had handled the press with aplomb. The media were ready to give him a break.

That was 1933, and in Franklin Roosevelt’s case, the media gave him a break.

For Barack Obama, the honeymoon was shorter.

Less than 36 hours after Obama took the oath of office, the White House denied news photographers access to the new president’s do-over swearing in, instead releasing official White House photos of the event. Reuters, The Associated Press and Agence France-Presse protested and refused to distribute the official photos (which nevertheless showed up on the websites of a number of large U.S. newspapers).

This is an important issue for news organisations, the public and for an administration that has promised a new era of transparency in doing the people’s business. How are people to know, for example, that the official photos haven’t been staged?

All U.S. administrations seek to manage the flow of information and the White House and the news media have a complex, interdependent relationship. Each needs the other. But it’s important that media organisations remember who’s most important.

For Howard Goller, Reuters editor for political and general news for the U.S. and Canada, it’s clear who’s most important.

“A news organisation’s first obligation is to its clients," he says. "Our correspondents have a front-row seat at the White House, we ask questions at news conferences and briefings, and we travel with the president wherever he goes. Our photographers work just as hard for our customers. We became concerned when on taking office, the new administration prevented Reuters and other news organisations from taking our own photos. We’ve had several conversations with the new administration since those first days and we expect a more open relationship going forward.”

Most administrations get a bit of a honeymoon. Gallup polls show that every incoming, newly-elected president back to Dwight Eisenhower enjoyed majority approval ratings. Even the lowest-rated incoming presidents, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, had job approval ratings of 51 percent and disapproval ratings of only 13 percent and 6 percent, respectively.

Obama’s approval rating, 68 percent, was exceeded only by that of John F. Kennedy, who had a 72 percent rating. Even a plurality of Republicans—43 percent—give Obama positive marks.

The media have also generally been positive—or at least, not very negative-- about new presidents during their administrations’ first 100 days, one of those round numbers we seem to like so much.

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism compared the coverage of the two most recent first-term elected presidents, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. In measuring the tone of coverage by network television, newspapers and a major weekly news magazine, the study found that only 28 percent of the coverage of both presidents’ first two months was “negative.”

No president has been more successful at managing the media than Roosevelt. So carefully did the administration control the president’s image that only a few pictures were published in newspapers of the president—disabled by polio-- using his wheelchair. Indeed, in a scene in the movie “Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942),” James Cagney was able with a straight face to portray Roosevelt in a song and dance number, as the “president” wittily told reporters what was on and what was off the record.

Betty Houchin Winfield, a journalism professor at the University of Missouri, argues in “FDR and the News Media” that “FDR’s consummate news management skills served as a major key to his political artistry and leadership legacy” and that “a strong president such as Roosevelt can indeed influence the journalists’ newsgathering, the reporters’ reactions, and the final news stories.”

As Douglas McCollam notes in the current issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, many believe much of the media are already in the tank for Obama.

A Pew Research Center poll during the heat of the campaign in September 2008 found that 36 percent of those questioned believed news organisations were biased in favor of Obama, while only 14 percent said the media were biased in favor of Republican John McCain. Forty percent detected no bias. A Rasmussen poll last summer was even more stark, with 49 percent saying they believed most reporters would “try to help the Democrat with their coverage.” Just 14 percent believed reporters would try to help McCain win and only 24 percent believed that “most reporters will try to offer unbiased coverage.”

Those are depressing numbers for a journalist to read—and the only way to respond is to aggressively cover the issues that matter to your audience.

For Reuters News, that’s a global audience and a financial audience.

Goller says that in response to the change in administrations, “We have made some big changes, especially in the way we work together to cover the big economic stories in the face of the financial crisis as well as the politics of climate change and health care….We’ve put more people on both the White House and the Congressional beats in part because the president…has promised change and both he and the Democratic-led Congress have made a priority of addressing the crisis, no small matter for our core financial clients.”

So how do we balance the need to be close to the newsmakers at the White House with the danger of being in a bubble where news can be managed?

Goller puts it well: “For Reuters, the key is to keep our eye on the issues, and that means to be aware of the impact a president’s words and actions or non-actions have on business, the economy, other countries and Americans as a people. We ask the tough questions in the briefings—and in the stories we write. If we don’t get the answers, our stories say so. This is our job.”

As in coverage of the Middle East, there are partisans who will never, ever be convinced that journalists can report objectively. As in the coverage of the recent Gaza fighting, all we can ask our audience to do is judge us on the journalism we produce—and tell us when we’re wrong.

It’s especially important now, as coverage of the new administration moves out of the warm, feel-good glow of the inauguration. As we saw Wednesday, the stimulus bill passed the House without a single Republican vote, a reminder of the deep divisions that remain and a sign that the story of the Obama administration is just beginning. It will be up to the hard-nosed, experienced journalists in Washington to push beyond the soft, easy, feel-good stories and tell the hard and complete truth.

– Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. —

By Bernd Debusmann

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - What is a real American? As opposed to an unreal American, a fake American, an un-American American or an anti-American American.

The answer is in the eye of the beholder and his or her political orientation. The question, and variations of it, has been asked in several periods of U.S. history and has bubbled up again, one of a number of odd sideshows, in the closing stages of the campaign for the presidential election on Nov. 4.

Are real Americans a minority in this richly diverse country of 300 million? You might well come to that conclusion if you believe the definitions publicly provided by several Republicans, including Sarah Palin, the vice presidential candidate, and conservative radio and TV talk show hosts.

“We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit and these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard-working, very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation,” Palin told a campaign rally in North Carolina in mid-October.

John McCain, the Republican candidate, has also sung the praise of small town (real) America. “Western Pennsylvania … is the most patriotic, most God-loving part of America,” he said at a rally there.

A belief in God, judging from speeches by both McCain and his Democratic opponent, Barack Obama, is an essential part of American-ness.

Robin Hayes, a Republican congressman from North Carolina, provided details on Americans who do not qualify as real. “Liberals hate real Americans that work, and accomplish, and achieve, and believe in God.” Both Palin and Hayes later “clarified” their remarks to say they had not actually meant to suggest the existence of pro- and anti-American parts of the country. Nevertheless, their words prompted a vivid debate in cyberspace and on talk radio.

REAL AMERICANS AND EUROPE

It quickly went beyond geography and into political beliefs. “Is it possible to be a real American and to be a socialist?” radio talk show host Chris Plante asked his listeners in the Washington area. “Can you still be a real American if you believe that the regimes that govern in Western Europe are a better way forward than the system that we have here?” Callers reassured him that no, that was not possible.

How much influence conservative talk radio has will be apparent on election day. The Rush Limbaugh Show alone claims 12 million daily listeners and other conservative talking heads, such as Sean Hannity, also pull in huge audiences. But listening to them, it is difficult not to come to the conclusion that they are preaching to the converted and their shows function as big echo chambers.

As the real vs unreal Americans debate unfolded over a few days - teacup storms have been relatively short in this election — another Republican member of Congress, Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota, poured fuel on the argument. She suggested in a television interview that the U.S. media should “take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out if they are pro-America or anti-America.”

That conjured up the ghost of Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who was helped in his hunt for hidden communists in the 1950s by a congressional investigative body called the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Sorting the populace into good people and not-so-good (or downright bad and dangerous) people is nothing new in an election campaign - the not-so-good people are always those of the other party. Seen in historical context, today’s good vs bad rankings are tame, as are negative advertisements.

When John Quincy Adams ran for re-election in 1828, for example, he called his opponent Andrew Jackson a cannibal and a murderer and he had unkind words for Jackson’s followers. The charge didn’t help. Adams lost.

In the 2008 campaign, attempts to portray one set of Americans (those living in rural areas and small towns) as more American than their big-city compatriots run counter to demographics. Nostalgia for a country that no longer exists?

According to the 2000 census - the counts are taken every 10 years - America’s big cities and their suburbs are home to 192 million people. That compares with just under 60 million in rural areas overall and 30 million in towns of fewer than 50,000 people.

A community of 50,000 people is large in comparison with Wasilla, the Alaskan town that had 5,000 people when Sarah Palin became its mayor in 1996. It has since grown to close to 10,000 - still small enough to fit the latest definition of real America.

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com)

WASHINGTON - As the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign enters its final week, reports are bubbling up about internal strife within the Republican ticket that suggest vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is trying to distance herself from the top of the ticket, John McCain.

Palin over the last few weeks has publicly expressed her differences with McCain on issues such as a constitutional ban on gay marriage, the campaign's decision to no longer contest Democrats in Michigan and her distaste for automated calls that have drawn scrutiny.

Politico.com reported this weekend that Palin has also cast aside advice from former George W. Bush aides assigned to help her on the campaign trail, citing their handling of her debut. She was roundly criticized for her poor performance in her initial national media interviews.

The report said:

Those Palin supporters, inside the campaign and out, said Palin blames her handlers for a botched rollout and a tarnished public image — even as others in McCain's camp blame the pick of the relatively inexperienced Alaska governor, and her public performance, for McCain's decline.

"She's lost confidence in most of the people on the plane," said a senior Republican who speaks to Palin, referring to her campaign jet. He said Palin had begun to "go rogue" in some of her public pronouncements and decisions.

After that story emerged, CNN reported that aides from the McCain side of the house were fighting back, including quoting one unnamed aide who described Palin as a "diva" and that she was looking out for her own political future in case they do not win the White House next week.

The report said:

McCain sources say Palin has gone off-message several times, and they privately wonder whether the incidents were deliberate. They cited an instance in which she labeled robocalls -- recorded messages often used to attack a candidate's opponent -- "irritating" even as the campaign defended their use. Also, they pointed to her telling reporters she disagreed with the campaign's decision to pull out of Michigan.

A second McCain source says she appears to be looking out for herself more than the McCain campaign.

"She is a diva. She takes no advice from anyone," said this McCain adviser. "She does not have any relationships of trust with any of us, her family or anyone else.

The reports of the internal strife come as McCain and Palin have been for weeks trailing the Democratic ticket of Barack Obama and Joe Biden in national polls and in a tight battle for states that traditionally have been Republican strongholds like Colorado and Virginia.

However, the latest Reuters/Zogby/C-Span national poll shows that McCain has closed the gap on rival Barack Obama to five points after being down as much as 12 points.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage. 

- Photo credit: Reuters/Brian Snyder (Palin and McCain get off their campaign bus last week in Ohio.)

(Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In the summer of 2006, a Gallup poll of more than 1,000 Americans found that one out of four favoured forcing Muslims in the United States, including U.S. citizens, to carry special identification. About a third said Muslims living in the U.S. sympathized with al Qaeda.

Almost a quarter said they wouldn’t want a Muslim as a neighbour. Republicans, the poll said, saw Muslims in a more negative light than Democrats and independents, and were more opposed to having Muslim neighbours. Fewer than half those polled thought U.S. Muslims were loyal to the United States.

A few months after the poll, callers to a Washington area radio talk show suggested branding Muslims with crescent-shaped tattoos and special stamps in their identity papers, the better to spot potential terrorists.

Polls are snapshots of attitudes, and attitudes can change. But incidents during the U.S. presidential election campaign, now in its final sprint towards November 4, show that fear and suspicion of Muslims persist undiminished and are being used as a political weapon.

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell became the most prominent member of the U.S. establishment to highlight the problem when he broke with John McCain, the Republican candidate and a personal friend of decades, to endorse Barack Obama, target of a prolonged campaign by activists who portray him as a Muslim.

One of his reasons: “I’m troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the (Republican) party say,” he told a television interviewer this week. “And it is permitted to be said such things as ‘well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.’ Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian.

“But the really right answer is, what if he is?” Powell continued.

“Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer is no, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion ‘He (Obama) is a Muslim and might be associated with terrorists.’ This is not the way we should be doing it in America.”

It was the first time that a senior figure of the American establishment had countered suggestions that Obama adheres to Islam by saying “So What?”, a question that should not be surprising in a country of immigrants that prides itself of its diversity. But the association is so toxic that even Obama himself has never asked that question.

FEAR AND BIGOTRY
Obama routinely denies the false notion that he is Muslim and stresses his commitment to Christianity and his regular church attendance. The website Obama has set up to rebuff a wide range of rumours notes the fact that he was sworn into the Senate on his family bible. That he finds it necessary to spell this out speaks volumes about a climate of fear and bigotry.

And about Obama’s caution: the first Muslim to win a seat in the 435-member House of Representatives, Keith Ellison, caused a storm of cyberspace criticism when he carried a Koran to his 2007 swearing-in ceremony. The hubbub subsided when it emerged that the Koran he used was once owned by an American with impeccable credentials - Thomas Jefferson.

Ellison, a Democrat from Minnesota, was the only Muslim in the House until last March, when he was joined by Andre Carson, a fellow Democrat from Indianapolis. Estimates of the number of Muslims in the United States range from 1.8 to more than 5 million. (The U.S. Census Bureau does not cover religious affiliation).

As the long election campaign neared its end, an obscure New York-based non-profit group called the Clarion Fund provided a textbook example of how fear of Muslims can be used for political ends.

The fund paid 70 newspapers in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Colorado, Iowa, Florida, Wisconsin, Nevada, New Hampshire and Virginia to deliver, as an advertising insert, 28 million copies of a documentary on radical Islam. These are all swing states where the Obama vs McCain fight is close.

The one-hour documentary, entitled Obsession - Radical Islam’s War against the West — was produced almost three years ago. It intersperses scenes of violence, including the September 11, 2001, attack on New York, with footage from Nazi rallies. The film found no traditional distributor and was first screened on college campuses last year, introduced by a right-wing activist, David Horowitz.

So why is the DVD mailed out now? Purely for educational purposes, according to a spokesman for the Clarion Fund. Nothing to do with fear-mongering.

The DVD’s sleeve, however, carries a slightly different message. “The threat of radical Islam is the most important issue facing us today. But it’s a topic that neither the presidential candidates nor the media are discussing openly. It’s our responsibility to ensure we can all make an informed vote in November.”

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com)

GREEN, Ohio - John McCain wants Americans to get rich.

That was the message from the Republican presidential hopeful Wednesday as he focused again on the differences in his tax proposals and those of Democratic rival Barack Obama.

The Arizona senator has hammered Obama in recent days for a philosophy of spreading Americans' wealth around, articulated by the Illinois senator in a now famous exchange with an Ohio man dubbed Joe the Plumber.

McCain promised at an outdoor rally with an enthusiatic crowd he and his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, would not make people or businesses send more money to the federal government.

"Sarah Palin and I will not raise your taxes, my friends," he said. "We want you to get wealthy."

Palin weighed in on the theme, too, calling Obama "Barack-the-wealth-spreader" and warning the crowd: "You have to really listen to our opponent's words because he's hiding his real agenda of redestributing your hard-earned money."

The Obama camp was unmoved. At a press conference, the Illinois senator brushed off the charges as just another attack strategy by his rivals. "They have been trying to throw whatever they can up against the wall to see what sticks, and this is their latest version," Obama said.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage:

Photo credit: Carlos Barria (McCain, with wife Cindy, reacts to supporters in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania

Media coverage of the U.S. presidential race has not so much cast Democratic candidate Barack Obama in a favorable light as it has portrayed Republican opponent John McCain in a negative one.

That' s the verbatim conclusion of a new report from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism that analyzes the way the press has covered the campaign.

The report shows that negative stories about Arizona Sen. McCain has been decidedly unfavorable and has worsened over time, with negative stories about him outnumbering favorable Obama stories by more than three to one.

That and many more interesting details are available in the 35-page report, but what caught our attention, being a business-oriented news service, was a graph charting the tone of press coverage devoted to both candidates and how it changed after the bankruptcy filing of investment bank Lehman Brothers.

When Lehman collapsed, the percentage of negative stories about Obama plunged from 30 percent that week in September to just under 10 percent a week later. It scooted back up to 45 percent by early October and has been down again since then. Negative stories about McCain eased to 50 percent from... well, just a bit over 50 percent. Since then it's surged to nearly 70 percent.

After Lehman collapsed, the reported noted that McCain tried to seize the initiative on the economic crisis.

According to the report:

In doing so, he became a dominant actor in the campaign drama, generating more coverage than any other presidential or vice presidential candidate for the first time in the general election season.

But as McCain did so, the media narrative about him grew increasingly negative.

There's no doubt numerous factors could have affected the tone of the media's campaign coverage, but it looks like Lehman's collapse had at least some effect, at least according to the PEJ's data. What do you think?

- Photo credit: Reuters/Jim Young (McCain and Obama at the 2008 Alfred E. Smith dinner)