Jack Shafer

After being bruised by tough questions in the primary debates, Newt Gingrich pouted yesterday that if nominated, he would not participate in any reporter-moderated presidential debates with Barack Obama.

“We should be able to talk to the American people without reporters playing gotcha, being clever or having 60-second rules like, ‘What would you do about Nigeria in 60 seconds?,’” the Georgia doughboy said, complaining that reporters serve as a “second Obama person” in debates.

Gingrich went on to propose a fall schedule of seven three-hour, Lincoln-Douglas style debates with Obama, ignoring the fact that three presidential campaign debates and one “town hall” meeting have already been set by the Commission on Presidential Debates. At the rate Gingrich is going, he will soon demand the right to choose the color of the debate set’s curtains, limit the number of close-up shots used on TV and stipulate that the bowls of candy in the debate green rooms contain no brown M&Ms.

Perhaps Gingrich really regards presidential campaign debates as execution by journalists. If so, he’s well within his rights to petition for something different in the fall. After all, nobody ever elected the press to police presidential campaign debates in perpetuity. Perhaps a historian, a retired judge or even John Edwards could perform better interrogations of the candidates than did Jim Lehrer, Tom Brokaw and Bob Schieffer in 2008.

But I doubt that Gingrich really blames journalists for the shortcomings of the debates, which anthropologist James R. McLeod calls elements of the lengthy “ritual sociodrama” that is a presidential campaign. More than any politician since Richard Nixon, Gingrich needs the press to demonize so he can change the subject whenever asked a tough question, as Juan Williams of Fox News and John King of CNN recently dared. If historians or retired judges were asking the questions, no matter how benign, I’m sure they’d earn a powerful Gingriching, too.

Journalists are easy to vilify because they’re eminently vilifiable. Their job is to intrude, to ignore decorum and to sow chaos where harmony presides. Show me a journalist and I’ll show you something not to like. Put me in front of a mirror and I’ll show you something to despise. It’s that sort of profession.

But for Gingrich to complain about intrusive questions at a debate is a little like a patient who complains that his doctor touched his private parts during a scheduled physical exam: Hey, buddy, the probes come with the appointment! Boiled to their essence, Gingrich’s fulminations against the press are really just variations on the theme “who are you to question?!” Somebody needs to remind Gingrich that he volunteered to be questioned. If he wants to swing at softball pitches, he should step into a batting cage, not an auditorium lit up for a debate.

Gingrich has routinely tried to rough up Obama by comparing him to radical community organizer Saul Alinsky. But as Washington Examiner columnist Philip Klein noted last week, it’s Gingrich who regularly avails himself of the Alinsky playbook to score points — against the press and other “elites.” Recounting Gingrich’s attacks on Fox’s Williams and CNN’s King in the debates, Klein accuses Gingrich of following Alinsky’s 13th rule to the letter: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” In these examples, Gingrich made Williams and King the face of the entire press corps and froze them into place as pushy know-it-alls and insensitive jerks. The move wasn’t for me, nor was it for you unless you’re part of the Gingrich and Palin base, which loves this sort of high-sticking of the press. If Gingrich were a man of principle, which he isn’t, he’d be equally outraged when the press asks his opponents equally aggressive questions. Instead, he’s silent.

The questions only get tougher when a candidate finally makes his way to the White House, as I attempted to show in a 2010 column. Obama — and nearly every president — hates the press. My favorite president-hates-the-press story is told by the late Charles Mohr, who spent a quarter of a century reporting for the New York Times.

In January 1965, shortly after President Lyndon B. Johnson gave the State of the Union address, Johnson invited Mohr to walk with him on the White House grounds. The talk, on “background,” lasted about an hour, during which Johnson berated Mohr’s paper for publishing an alleged error. The president then offered to make himself available to the paper to check such flawed stories. “Well, can I check something now?” Mohr asked Johnson. Johnson said yes, and Mohr asked him about some recent government raises. Mohr continues:

From mid-stride, the President came to a halt, glowered at me … and said:

“Here you are, alone with the President of the United States and the Leader of the Free World, and you ask a chicken-shit question like that.” He then added, “Yes, yes, that’s right. You want to run that, you go ahead.” Which I did.

The campaign sociodrama template allows Gingrich either to score points with his supporters and would-be supporters directly by currying favor with the press corps to get flattering coverage, or to score points against the press with his petty, petulant and peeved outbursts. As the campaign underdog, Gingrich needs the press more than the press needs him, if only so he can deride them as purveyors of barnyard dirt. If he makes it to the fall contest, he’ll be hoping for rematches with both Juan Williams and John King.

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Imagine the umbrage against the press if Sarah Palin were running. But don’t do it in email and send it to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. See my Twitter feed, which is now written by a reverend whom I’ve assigned to the task. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns and subscribe to this hand-built RSS feed for corrections to my column.

PHOTO: U.S. Republican presidential candidate and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich stands during a rally in Jacksonville, Florida, January 30, 2012. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton

Everybody has an email disaster story to share: Accidentally cc:ing to your colleagues X-rated correspondence with your lover; prematurely forwarding to your staff the bad news about impending layoffs; using the wrong list to send letters of acceptance to college applicants who have been rejected. But in the grand constellation of email goofs, who can beat the blunders of former CIA officer John Kiriakou? If the criminal complaint filed against him this week in U.S. District Court in Alexandria is accurate, he could spend 30 years in prison for his email transgressions.

Drawing on correspondence obtained via search warrants served on two email accounts associated with Kiriakou, the government has charged him with illegally giving up the identity of a covert officer, disclosing classified secrets and lying to the CIA.

The emails, from which the complaint quotes, are less a smoking gun pointing to wrongdoing than they are Kiriakou’s suicide note. How could a CIA officer who worked at the agency from 1990 to 2004 handling dicey, undercover overseas assignments, including the 2002 capture of Al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah, have been so cavalier as to discuss the name of a covert officer with a journalist in email? Furthermore, how could the journalists — who go unnamed in the complaint — have been so reckless as to use an insecure medium to converse with a spook about classified material?

Don’t these people ever go to the movies?

According to the complaint, Kiriakou exchanged a number of incriminating emails in 2007, 2008 and 2009 with individuals it calls “Journalist A,” “Journalist B,” and “Journalist C.” The complaint asserts that Kiriakou identified “Covert Officer A” to Journalist A by name, which is a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. (The act prohibits government employees who are authorized to know the identity of a covert officer from sharing that information with anyone who is not authorized. Remember the Valerie Plame episode?)

Kiriakou is also alleged to have disclosed information about the classified operation Covert Officer A was working on. Covert Officer A’s name was not published by Journalist A or anyone else, but the complaint alleges that Journalist A shared the officer’s name with legal defenders of Guantánamo detainees. The government first became aware of the leak when Guantánamo lawyers used this information in a 2009 legal filing as part of the defense of one of the detainees.

Again, citing emails, prosecutors maintain that Kiriakou disclosed or confirmed to “Journalists A, B, and C” classified information about the role of “Officer B” in the 2002 capture of Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan. (Kiriakou helped lead that operation.) Kiriakou is also alleged to have given two of the journalists Officer B’s contact information. After Journalist A shared Officer B’s phone number with a defense investigator, “the defense investigator was able to quickly and accurately identify Officer B and photograph him,” the complaint states. “Four photographs of Officer B were included in the packets of photographs recovered at Guantánamo.”

Everything a current or former CIA employee writes for publication must be reviewed by the agency prior to publication. In a 2008 email, Kiriakou tells the coauthor of a book he’s working on (eventually published as The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror) of a lie he has told the CIA reviewer. Such lies violate Title 18, United States Code, Section 1001. In his email, Kiriakou wrote:

Here you go, [first name of coauthor redacted]. I laid it on thick. And I said some things were fictionalized when in fact they weren’t. There’s no way [the CIA reviewers are] going to go through years of cable traffic to see if I’ve fictionalized, so we might get some things through. Enjoy. John.

Did Kiriakou misplace whatever tradecraft he acquired in his 15 years at the agency? There is no other explanation for the enormous — and incriminating — electronic trail he generated in his emails. But at least one of the journalists he communicated with doesn’t appear to have practiced outstanding presscraft, either.

Who are Journalists A, B, and C? I’ve parlor-gamed with my colleagues over the identities of A and C to inconclusive results.

But ID’ing Journalist B is a simple matter: The complaint calls him the author of a New York Times story from June 22, 2008, “Inside a 9/11 Mastermind’s Interrogation.” That story was written by Times national security correspondent Scott Shane, and a Times news story about the prosecution acknowledges the fact this way: “Kiriakou is also accused of helping another reporter, Scott Shane of the New York Times, learn or confirm the name of another official involved in the interrogation program, which the Times published in a June 2008 article.”

The Times declined my request to talk to Shane about his contact with Kiriakou, citing the advice of its attorneys. The paper did provide a statement, however, in which it said that Journalists A and C did not work for the Times, and, “Neither the Times nor its reporter has been contacted by investigators at any time, and no information has been provided by the newspaper or the reporter to the investigators.”

Shane behaves conscientiously in his emails, especially compared with Journalist A. The CIA officer he discussed in emails with Kiriakou — Officer B — was not covert, hence not covered by the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. So in chatting up his source on email about Officer B, Shane wasn’t putting him in any immediate, direct peril.

I can’t determine from the email excerpts whether Shane directly asked Kiriakou to confirm Officer B’s participation in a classified operation. The complaint alleges that the conversation “establishes probable cause” that Kiriakou confirmed the information, “thereby revealing classified information.” If Shane did ask directly about a classified operation, it’s still the type of thing most national security reporters are leery about discussing via email.

It’s Kiriakou who seems wildly undisciplined in this complaint. For instance, after Shane’s article was published in the Times, Kiriakou emailed Officer B denying that he had any role in naming him. “I did not cooperate with the article,” he allegedly lied to Officer B. “While it might not be illegal to name you [in the article], it would certainly be immoral.”

Shane also distinguishes himself with relentlessness. We learn from the complaint that he aggressively pursued Officer B, phoning him, emailing him and visiting his house, where Shane left notes under the door and in the mailbox. He even cased Officer B’s house for four hours and tried to contact the man’s mother, sister and high school friend. That’s what I call reporting.

For more about Officer B and why the Times named him, see this Times Editors’ Note, which was published the same day as Shane’s piece.

The carelessness of Journalist A is so egregious that it must be called out. Anybody working on a national security story must be mindful of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, especially in the post-Plame era. I’m all for journalists pestering sources — even agency veterans — for classified information, even about the identities of covert officers. But common sense dictates where and how to pester!

According to the emails quoted in the complaint, Journalist A repeatedly asked Kiriakou for Covert Officer A’s identity, even sending him a list of names from which he asked Kiriakou to “pick out” the officer’s name. Kiriakou recalls the name and turns it over to Journalist A, who allegedly emailed it two hours later to the defense investigator — with the officer’s name in the subject line! Common sense also dictates who you share your information with and how you share it! Journalist A really went off the reservation by sharing Covert Officer A’s identity with the defense investigators in Guantánamo. Kiriakou and Journalist A were so lax in their communications, they might as well have conducted their conversation on Twitter for all the world to see.

The complaint does not explain how the government obtained the email from Journalist A to the defense investigators about Covert Officer A, but the government emphasizes that it found no evidence of any criminal wrongdoing by the defense investigators. Go ahead and parlor-game this one however you like.

The emails make the government’s case look solid enough, but the prosecution has the slight smell of vendetta to it. Kiriakou is not a very popular fellow at the CIA because of the wide-ranging interviews he has given to the press. In late 2007, Kiriakou appeared on ABC News, where he gave an extensive interview about the CIA and the Abu Zubaydah operation. (See this transcript [pdf].) Kiriakou was less than honest about his role in the operation, as Gawker’s John Cook demonstrated and ABC News has acknowledged. Kiriakou became a regular not only at ABC News but also on MSNBC and CNN, where he routinely spoke about intelligence issues, and in a variety of newspapers as a named source.

Two of the four counts against Kiriakou allege violations of the Espionage Act for leaking classified information about the operation Officer B participated in. But should Kiriakou go to jail for making the sort of sensitive disclosures published in news stories almost every day? There are “authorized” leaks, such as the ones from the run-up to the Iraq war, in which the Bush administration used cherry-picked intelligence nuggets in an attempt to convince the public that Saddam Hussein was building scary weapons. Then there are the hard-to-interpret leaks, such as the torrent that rained down on Bob Woodward for his 2010 book, Obama’s Wars, which teems with classified information about briefings, NSA programs, and CIA operations in Afghanistan, as Michael Isikoff writes. And then there is the ferreting out of classified information that the government doesn’t really want you to know, of which this 2011 Reuters report is an example.

If I were in charge of this case, I wouldn’t want to explain to a jury the disparity of why Kiriakou is being prosecuted but the other leakers aren’t. How sensitive was the information shared about Officer B? The government has declassified the information about Officer B in order to make the Kiriakou prosecution. In other words, it is confirming a leak in order to punish a leaker. Another count — that Kiriakou lied to CIA officials about his book — deserves punishment, but it’s hard to imagine the charge standing by itself outside this bundle of charges.

As for the charge that Kiriakou leaked a covert officer’s identity, I can only wish prosecutors good luck. As Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists writes, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act has never been used in a contested prosecution before, and Kiriakou’s attorney has told the Times his client will plead not guilty. Prosecutors get nervous when laws like the Intelligence Identities Protection Act face their first judicial review. They always worry that sections of the law will be struck down by the courts, leaving them nothing to wave in the face of suspects to compel them to plead guilty.

None of the alphabetically named journalists have been charged with breaking the law. Still, this prosecution should remind all reporters — not just the folks on the national security beat — to mind their manners and always be looking over their shoulders. The same should go for sources.

It should also go without saying that sources need to mind their manners, too. If the feds convict Kiriakou on all counts and send him to prison for 30 years, he’ll have plenty of time to bone up on his email etiquette.

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Thanks to the The Week, from whose pages I gleaned the email nightmares at the top of the piece. Send your email nightmares to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. I have yet to experience a Twitter nightmare, but I’m sure it’s coming. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns and subscribe to this hand-built RSS feed for corrections to my column.

PHOTO: John Kiriakou, from ABC News.

I’ve found a great spot for most of the Republican presidential candidates — active and vanquished — to retire to after Barack Obama wins his second term in November. Dubbed “Dementiaville” in press accounts, it’s a mock-1950s “village” of 23 residences that the Swiss are building in Wiedlisbach to house 150 cognitively impaired old folks.

Dementiaville follows a similar nursing home that was established in the Amsterdam suburbs in 2009, where the residents (or their guardians) “pay €5,000 a month to live in a world of carefully staged illusion,” as the U.K. Independent reports today. The visual and architectural cues at Dementiaville will all be from the comforting 1950s, when the residents still had full possession of their minds. The operation’s caretakers “will dress as gardeners, hairdressers and shop assistants,” the paper continues, to extend the illusion. Dementiaville founder Markus Vögtlin claims that the planned environment at the Amsterdam village makes its patients “feel comfortable. I call it travelling back in time.”

Although the geriatric-care profession is split on the value of stockpiling dementia patients in the equivalent of the old Ozzie and Harriet back lot, it’s easy to discern who is the target of Dementiaville’s marketing: The mentally complete offspring and the spouses of the patients, who naturally feel guilty for delegating care to an institution.

When campaigning, Republican presidential candidates tend to build their own little Dementiavilles, cherry-picking what they consider the best of the 1950s as they call for the return of cheap energy, U.S. industrial and military hegemony, a more business-friendly economy, and respect for authority. The Republican campaign ad imagery and its language of “renewal,” popular since the Age of Reagan, concentrates on tree-lined streets and carefree kids riding their bikes, church socials, pickup baseball games, sunny days, and smiling snowmen. It’s no coincidence that Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney spent some of their teen years in this imagined utopia.

This idealization of the 1950s persists because few who invoke the decade bother to remember it correctly. Yes, it was a wonderful decade for some, but it doesn’t take a McGovernite to point out that Jim Crow, segregation, Little Rock, and the mistreatment of women and homosexuals should strike those years from the utopia registry.

The Republican tunnel vision, such as it is, manifests itself in campaign slogans, too. Mitt Romney’s “Keep America America” palaver sounded enough like “Keep America American” to transmit a racially coded message about a certain somebody who is suspected by some of being a Muslim who wasn’t born here, by others of exhibiting “Kenyan, anti-colonial behaviors,” or by others of being a socialist. Obviously, as the Atlantic reported in December, the Romney campaign should have done a better job of slogan-picking considering the way xenophobes and racists have used it. The Santorum campaign wishes it had better vetted its early campaign slogan, “Fighting to make America America again.” It echoes Romney’s but it also happens to be a line from a pro-union poem by African-American (and gay) poet Langston Hughes. (After the overlap was discovered, the Santorum slogan was retired.)

If the campaign were simply about marketing 1950s nostalgia, Santorum would be leading the polls. More than any other candidate, he yearns for the decade he was barely born into (b. 1958), when the Mass was in Latin, blue laws were the rule and not the exception, and abortion was back-alley or required a plane ride. Alone among the candidates, Santorum would self-deport into the Pleasantville mise-en-scène if the movie’s cinematic magic were real.

Any slots the Republican candidates decline to fill at Dementiaville can be reserved for those Democrats who have their own, separate delusions about the 1950s. Democrats look back fondly to the era, and not just because it marked the peak of union membership. It was also a time when a good Republican (Jacob Javits) was almost indistinguishable from a Democrat. The GOP was so rife with Huntsmen, the real partisan action pitted the South’s Democrats against the rest of the country’s Democrats.

The extraordinary economic growth of the 1950s came after both the Great Depression and the deprivations of World War II, so it’s probably the clang of cash that makes the decade so alluring for everybody. The decade sits in the middle of what some economists call the “Great Compression,” which ran from about 1934 to 1979 and during which economic inequality was historically low. Even hard-nosed Democrats like Paul Krugman swoon over the 1950s, as his critics on the right have noted. Krugman writes in his 2007 book, The Conscience of a Liberal:

[T]he political and economic environment of my youth stands revealed as a paradise lost, an exceptional episode in our nation’s history.

Postwar America was, above all, a middle-class society. The great boom in wages that began with World War II had lifted tens of millions of Americans—my parents among them—from urban slums and rural poverty to a life of home ownership and unprecedented comfort. The rich, on the other hand, had lost ground: They were few in number and, relative to the prosperous middle, not all that rich.

And yes, Krugman fondly recalls the long bike rides and quiet streets of those bygone times.

Few candidates have ever been able to conjure a future that’s anywhere as blissful as the past. (The 2008 Obama campaign, with its abstract notions of “change” and its equally vague “Yes, We Can” exhortations is the only one that comes to mind. Oh, yeah, Clinton spoke of a bridge to the 21st century, but that mostly elicited laughter.) But the 1950s aren’t so durable that the psychological karma of those years can be harvested forever. By the time the 2016 campaign arrives, nobody younger than 60 will possess any genuine memories of those days. Perhaps nostalgia transcends actual experience and politicians will trade on that decade forever. But if I were designing Dementiaville (or running a campaign!), I’d go heavy on the Beatles on the intercom and decorate the bedrooms with lava lamps as my signature theme.

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Ron Paul seems disconnected from 1950s nostalgia. Or am I wrong? Send your best 1950s memories to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. My Twitter feed is composed in the future. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns, and subscribe to this hand-built RSS feed for corrections to my column.

PHOTO: A man plays ping pong at a program for people with Alzheimer’s and dementia in Los Angeles REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

As tech giants Apple and Amazon apply the squeeze, there has never been a worse time to be in the publishing business. Apple has turned its disruptive death ray on the publishers with an update of its free “iBooks” app, which allows anybody with a Mac to build an ebook and publish for sale in the company’s iBookstore. The rapacious bastards at Amazon are attacking on the same front with their KF8 Kindle software, plus they’re signing book authors (Deepak Chopra, Timothy Ferriss, James Franco, Penny Marshall and more to come) to their publishing imprint. An email, purportedly written by an anonymous book industry “insider” and published at PandoDaily today, got a lot of attention on the Web with its claim that Amazon’s ultimate goal is to destroy conventional publishing.

If it’s murder for publishers and booksellers, though, it’s heaven for book readers. I’ve been buying, reading and collecting books since the late 1960s, and with the exception of the times I’ve found rare first editions for sale for a buck at thrift stores or made similar discoveries at library-discard sales, books have never been more available or more affordable in my lifetime.

Until the late 1990s, I always kept in my wallet a neatly folded short list of books I was looking for. Theoretically, any of these books could have been mine by paying list price at a bookstore or by paying a  book finder to run them down for me. But because I was so poor in my early years and so cheap in my later ones, I always resisted paying full ticket for a book. Any book I purchased would remain on my bookshelves — even after I had read it — because I might need it again for work or pleasure. The only time I got rid of books was when I visited used shops, where I would exchange books in a trade.

Then came the Internet. The pain and pleasure of chasing down new books was erased by my Amazon account, where they were always cheaper. The never-ending stacks of used books at AbeBooks and Powell’s (and later at Amazon) made my neatly folded short list obsolete and, to my delight, put a smaller dent in my wallet. One of the great joys of buying used books online is that the sources are now international. Just last week I picked up Michael Frayn’s “Towards the End of the Morning” for $10 delivered from the UK.

Oh, every now and then I’ll strike out. A book will be so rare that not even the AbeBooks consortium has it, or if they do the price is prohibitive. Sometimes the title is so obscure that Google Books or Archive.org hasn’t gotten around to preserving it and I will have to go to my public library or a university library. But that’s really rare. Even if a book is out of print, it’s usually within reach, which is the whole point anyway.

The falling prices of new books caused me to buy more of them. But the collapse of used-book prices brought on by the Web are what really caused my collection to swell. The lower prices changed my relationship with books. I no longer considered each and every volume “my precious.” Yes, I still loved every book, but the Web had made them easily replaceable. In the new order, a book that wasn’t carrying its weight in my collection could lose its spot on the shelf and be shuffled off to a used shop. But now that the Web has driven down the cost of used books, the cash or trade that I was offered rarely made it worth the trip to the shop. So I started tossing books, or if my mother-in-law insisted, I would donate them to the local library book sale. Had my fireplace been working, I would have burned them to stay warm in the winter.

Except for a few volumes in my library — my journalism books, my drug books, my Mencken books, my lit-favorites, and a few other volumes I’ve developed a sentimental connection with — not many books have a greater hold on me than a stack of magazines. (And, yes, I used to collect magazines. You would have adored my collection of the first five years of Wired.)

The electronification of books has only made this reader’s life better. Whenever I need a recent book on deadline and my local bookstore doesn’t have it and Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature fails me, I can still usually download it via Kindle. Filling my iPhone and family iPad with free classics (like Lafcadio Hearn’s “Kwaidan”) I feel just like the character in the “Twilight Zone” episode “Time Enough at Last,” only I still have my eyeglasses!

I welcome the Apple and Amazon wrecking balls if only because their efforts will add to the ubiquity of books, and that growing ubiquity will further drive down the prices of used books. At the rate we’re going, it will soon make economic sense for me to repair my fireplace and stave off winter’s cold by burning books. I intend to use my paperback edition of “Fahrenheit 451″ as tinder for the first blaze.

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Send free ebooks to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. I hope someday to publish my collected Twitter feed as an ebook. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns, and subscribe to this hand-built RSS feed for corrections to my column.

PHOTO: Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller speaks at a news conference introducing a digital textbook service, in New York, January 19, 2012.  REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton

This piece originally appeared in Reuters Magazine, a special edition publication ahead of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

In late October, a deflated Julian Assange called a press conference in London to announce he may have to mothball WikiLeaks. The reason, he said, was money. Visa, MasterCard, Western Union and Paypal were preventing supporters from donating to the organization, Assange explained. He warned that unless the bankers’ blockade was lifted at once, the cash-strapped organization would soon die.

By then, however, the biggest problem WikiLeaks faced wasn’t financial. After all, the group had always operated on a shoestring, its leader famously sleeping somewhere other than at home or in a hotel most nights. The main concern was productivity: WikiLeaks and Assange, its 40-year-old provocateur, were out of scoops.

And oh, what a string of scoops it had run off in the previous 18 months. WikiLeaks’ 2010 posting of a classified video showing civilian casualties during an Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad, which Assange titled “Collateral Murder,” drew debate and viewers around the world. Then came its distribution of classified documents from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Guantánamo Bay prison camp files, and the classified U.S. State Department diplomatic cables to the Guardian, the New York Times, Der Spiegel, and other news outlets.

But after the diplomatic cable stories petered out in September, so too did WikiLeaks. Its slide into irrelevance after months of dominating the headlines should have been enough to humble even Assange. His five-year-old supranational group, with its hardened computer infrastructure and sophisticated encryption algorithms, was supposedly immune to government crackdowns and corporate retaliation. But instead of flourishing, as Assange had predicted, WikiLeaks all but vaporized in its 16th minute of fame: Its auteur was shackled with a security bracelet, fighting extradition to Sweden, where authorities want to question him regarding charges of sexual assault; WikiLeaks members and allies, alienated by the dictatorial Assange, had abandoned him; and leakers were no longer making their substantial deposits in WikiLeaks computers.

You can date the beginning of this decline to mid-2010, when Assange’s alleged supersource, U.S. Army Private First Class Bradley Manning — suspected of having leaked the Afghanistan, Iraq, Gitmo, and diplomatic cable files — was jailed. Assange was still boasting to Forbes in November 2010 that WikiLeaks was receiving so many leaks that it had to turn off the submission form on its site and that “about 50 percent” of the documents in its hoard were from the private sector (banking, oil, pharmaceuticals). But despite those boasts, he never delivered those corporate exposés. The Manning trove was his last big data dump, a reminder that journalists are only as good as their sources. Last year, after teasing 60 Minutes about explosive documents he hinted could take down a bank (Bank of America?), he reportedly backpedaled in private. Was he overselling his material, or was he holding back the bank documents for maximum impact later? Only Julian Assange, international man of mystery, knew for sure.

The WikiLeaks fade-out demonstrates the advantage established news institutions have over wildcatters like Assange. He may have found the oil, but he had no way of making it useful to the masses. The established press — love them or hate them — had the means to quickly figure out what the Manning files meant and the skill to present them in readable form, something Assange appears to be incapable of doing. The pressies also had lawyers who knew how to beat back the legal threats of governments, namely the United States, that did not want the files published. Of course, Assange mocked attempts by the Times and the Guardian to discuss the leaks with the governments involved prior to publication as selling out. In a new documentary, “True Stories: WikiLeaks,” Assange snarls that the mainstream media “cannot be trusted” because they are “part of the social network of the elite.” Even if he’s right, that elite is not a static entity with a single set of interests. That governments around the globe recoiled at the Times and Guardian stories based on WikiLeaks material puts the lie to Assange’s sweeping condemnation.

I mean no disrespect to Assange by calling him a wildcatter — or by calling him a journalist! (If digging up state secrets and revealing them to the public isn’t an act of journalism, what is?) The wildcatter label captures the entrepreneurial qualities he brought to his work. Charlie Beckett, of the London School of Economics and Political Science, notes that Assange drew on his skills as a programmer and hacker to spot “a new business model and a novel kind of platform.” As Beckett points out, there are plenty of programmers and hackers out there, so “what made WikiLeaks work was Assange’s ideological drive and his all-consuming desire to use digital communications as a political weapon.”

Although it’s difficult to think of Assange without imagining gigabytes of classified data coursing around the Web, this cybercentric view denies him his proper status in the pantheon of secrecy hackers. He has never been a leaker; instead, he positioned himself as a broker of leaks. At first, he believed WikiLeaks could be a passive platform, dispersing anonymous leaks to an interested world. Assange had moderate success early on interesting journalists in his files — mainstream outlets generated numerous stories from WikiLeaks documents that outraged governments (the Chinese and the British), religions (Scientologists and Mormons), banks, and other power centers. But it wasn’t until Assange started working with the mainstream media on the Afghanistan and Iraq files — aping the traditional source-journalist relationship — that he started maximizing the “yield” from his files.

Assange’s current intimacy with editors and reporters places him closer to the tradition of the all-star leakers of the 1970s — Daniel Ellsberg (the Pentagon Papers), Philip Agee (outing CIA officers), Navy Yeoman Charles Radford (the Indo-Pakistan conflict) — who teamed with journalists or publishers to get their secrets out. Like them, Assange was (and is) on a suicide mission to destabilize the system.

But unlike Assange, the aforementioned focused their outrage on a single issue: Ellsberg exposed the lies at the heart of the United States’ Vietnam policy; Agee, a born-again Marxist, opposed what he considered to be U.S. imperialism; Radford (who served his Mormon mission in India) objected to the Nixon administration’s favoritism toward Pakistan. These lone wolves understood they had booked one-way trips — that having unloaded their stash of secrets, their next stops were jail, exile or obscurity.

Assange’s self-defined role as go-between rather than leaker, and his ambition to build a perpetual secret-exposing machine, further differentiates him from the all-stars. Steven Aftergood, who runs the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy, says: “The WikiLeaks disclosures were presented — above all — as a challenge to official secrecy rather than as a focused revelation of any particular scandal or misdeed or an effort to redirect U.S. foreign policy.”

Despite his many troubles, Assange is still swinging. In December, he gave the Washington Post sales brochures from which the paper fashioned a page-one story about the worldwide market for invasive surveillance technology. (Not exactly groundbreaking, but worthy enough.)

Whatever WikiLeaks’ current status, it’s fair to ask what it has accomplished. Can we identify any significant changes in politics or policy prompted by its revelations? (To be fair, that’s a tough question to ask of any news organization.) Its most tangible accomplishment must be that it has given the world a better look at how the United States prosecutes its wars and conducts its diplomacy. “The releases included quite a few records of enduring interest, but many others of only passing curiosity, and perhaps a majority that are of no particular significance at all,” says Aftergood. “We probably need more time and perspective to reach a final judgment on WikiLeaks’ lasting impact … The Pentagon Papers were a phenomenon, but what was their impact, really? Did anyone actually read them? Or did their significance arise from the over-reaction of the Nixon Administration?”

But who can deny the impact of the leakers of the 1970s? A new breed of national security reporter, inspired by the revelations of those whistleblowers, began filing tough dispatches. The Freedom of Information Act, established in the late 1960s, was strengthened, giving reporters additional leverage in their investigations. And Senate hearings exposed the multidecade excesses of the CIA, the FBI and the military intelligence agencies.

WikiLeaks hasn’t inspired much in the way of official government investigations, open-government legislation or even successful imitators. Governments and corporations have proved how good they are at stifling leakers and their depositories. The most direct effect, Aftergood notes, is a tightening of U.S. government computer security: Security had been loosened after 9/11 to make dot-connecting easier in the hope of preventing another attack. Aftergood also notes that the diplomatic cable leaks caused the U.S. to transfer some personnel and curtail diplomacy, and that the revelations strained U.S. diplomatic relations with some nations. In this case, WikiLeaks may have shaken the earth, but Assange’s organization did not really change it.

Or maybe it did. Gideon Rachman gave a wonderfully perverse reading of the impact of the publication of the diplomatic cables last December in the Financial Times, declaring that Assange and WikiLeaks had done America “a massive favour” by “inadvertently debunking decades-old conspiracy theories about its foreign policy … Where WikiLeaks does reveal a gap between America’s public statements and private discussions, it tends to be because U.S. representatives are being diplomatic rather than duplicitous.” Although the candor in many of those cables embarrassed the United States, the complete dump flattered it because it showed the public positions of the United States are nearly identical to the private positions expressed in the cables. This consistency, Rachman argues, dispels the “idea that something sinister is going on behind the walls of the U.S. embassy.”

Rachman’s formulation sounds flip, but it isn’t. Obviously, some of those cables and action reports embarrassed the U.S. government or did damage to its coveted “sources and methods” of information collection and diplomacy. But when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton ripped the leak of the diplomatic cables as “an attack on the international community,” she gave hyperbole a bad name. Secretary Clinton’s claim that the confidential conversations between governments of the sort that WikiLeaks exposed “safeguard global security and advance economic prosperity” reads like a hack passage out of a civics textbook. The reason governments, totalitarian and democratic, labor to keep their diplomatic works — trivial and important — wrapped in secrecy has less to do with ensuring world peace and prosperity than with avoiding scrutiny by their citizens. If international diplomacy can be redefined as politics by other means, what governments most object to is not the leak of cables but a full public discussion of what governments do in private in the public’s name.

Setting aside for a moment Assange’s bad manners, his megalomania and his supreme skills as a bridge-burner, we are in his debt for reigniting debate over the prosecution of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Better than any leaker — or broker of leaks — before him, Assange figured out a new mechanism for the many to monitor the powerful few.

“The dominant message conveyed by WikiLeaks was, ‘You cannot keep your secrets from us,’” says Aftergood. “But the gathering official response is, ‘Oh, yes we can.’” Aftergood is right. The careers of leakers are traditionally short-lived. Even if they aren’t caught and prosecuted, the Ellsbergs and Mannings who leak get evicted from the secrets trove. The dependency of the press and other institutions, including governments, on leakers is well documented. Journalists, of course, need leaks to perform their watchdog function. But governments depend on them, too, to check and balance the bureaucracy that has grown unaccountable.

What WikiLeaks demonstrated in its 16th minute of fame is the extreme dependency of leakers on strong institutions. It may be too late to rescue WikiLeaks by sending Assange to the Emily Post Institute for remedial studies in good manners. But his example stands — for any news organization or pirate outfit bold enough to follow his lead.

PHOTO: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange speaks to the media outside the High Court in London, December 5, 2011. REUTERS/Suzanne Plunkett

Newly elected presidents call for the reorganization of the federal government with such regularity that a federal Department of Reorganization should be established to assist them in their attempts to downsize the bureaucracy, eliminate redundant agencies, reduce red tape, cut costs, and tame the out-of-control agencies created and fed by the presidents elected before them. If you’re earnest enough to think that those moves will actually reduce the size or cost of federal government, I’ve got a monument I’d like to sell you.

President Barack Obama originally promised to streamline federal bureaucracy in his 2011 State of the Union speech but only got around to specifics last Friday, as he requested new powers to merge agencies subject to an up-or-down vote by Congress. Obama’s first target: the Commerce Department. He wants to meld the Small Business Administration and five additional trade and business agencies into one body that would replace the Department of Commerce. Obama promised savings of $3 billion over the next decade and to cut 1,000 to 2,000 jobs through attrition over the same period.

The presidential urge to reorganize goes back to Theodore Roosevelt, who established the Keep Commission in 1905 to bring efficiency and accountability to bureaucracy. Scholar Oscar Kraines admiringly called Roosevelt’s attempt to remake Washington in his image “a bold step … to break down the long-existing aim and the tendency of Congress to retain full legislative authority in the management of the public business.” According to political scientist Peri E. Arnold, 11 of 14 presidents elected in the 20th century attempted some sort of governmental reorganization. Congress rightly viewed the Keep Commission as a presidential power grab and has continued to contest similar presidential reorg plans by Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, the Bushes and Bill Clinton — who called his reorganization plan “reinventing government.”

Jimmy Carter was probably the grabbiest of the reorg lot. Although he based his 1976 presidential campaign on reorganizing government to make it work better, once he got to the White House he merely expanded the bureaucracy, adding the Department of Energy and the Department of Education to the Cabinet. (He proposed both a Department of Developmental Assistance and a Department of Natural Resources, incorporating Interior and some agencies from Agriculture, but Congress said no.)

“Carter’s determination to move ahead on cabinet-level reorganization despite the misgivings of many of his aides about both the value and political feasibility of the project is puzzling,” wrote Ronald P. Seyb in a study of the Carter years. “Even the plan’s strongest supporters conceded that it would do little to streamline the bureaucracy because of Carter’s promise that reorganization would not require personnel reductions, realize cost savings, or generate noticeable improvements in administrative efficiency, and the political opposition it would provoke would be close to insuperable.”

Supporters invariably wrap federal reorganization up in good-government rhetoric about capturing efficiencies and saving taxpayers money. Done right, reorgs can be a force for good, but they are usually just a diversion in the power game. Presidents may say they want to reform the bureaucracies out of a desire to trim and speed the bureaucracies, but more often than not their real motivation is to break the bureaucracies’ hold on power. (The most effective downsizing of government comes when whole agencies are eliminated or neutered, as was the case in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Congress and the White House gutted the Civil Aeronautics Board and the Interstate Commerce Commission. Strictly speaking, the CAB and ICC weren’t reorged, they were destroyed.)

“Simply put, with the exception of few symbolic issues, almost anything a president wishes to accomplish must be accomplished through the bureaucracy,” David Lowery writes in his article “The Presidency, the Bureaucracy, and Reinvention: A Gentle Plea for Chaos.” This makes bureaucracies the president’s enemy. He resents any bureaucracy whose first allegiance is to Congress, corporate constituents, or activist brigades. Obama, like presidents before him, swings the reorganizational wrecking ball not so much to increase efficiencies as to weaken congressional power over Cabinet bureaucracies and strengthen executive branch control.

In his Friday speech, Obama unintentionally acknowledged how presidents stack and restack bureaucracies to maximize White House power. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which is now inside Commerce, would be shuffled off to the Department of Interior. Obama claimed that NOAA was originally placed inside Commerce instead of Interior, because “apparently, it had something to do with President Nixon being unhappy with his Interior secretary for criticizing him about the Vietnam War.” That Barack Obama would pull a similar reorg trick if he were feuding with his Interior secretary should go without saying. If you can’t beat your bureaucratic enemies, reorg your way around them.

Obama reminded us all that presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan held the power to reorg that he seeks: All he wants is what Congress allowed to lapse in 1984. That’s true. But he insulted everybody with an IQ greater than 85 by adding that his request shouldn’t be regarded as “a partisan issue.” The diminution of congressional power — especially Republican congressional power — can’t be seen as anything but partisan. No committee chairman, even if the president hails from his party, wants to see his current authority disrupted by a shuffling of the Cabinet deck.

Besides fighting the Republican Congress, Obama will also have to go a few rounds with the agencies he hopes to reshuffle. NOAA doesn’t necessarily want to relocate from Commerce, where it is the biggest agency, to Interior where it would cast a lesser footprint. And as Government Executive reported on Friday, environmental activists, who dislike Interior’s “culture,” reject the idea of a NOAA reorg. “The move could erode the capabilities and mute the voice of the government’s primary agency for protecting our oceans and the ecosystems and economies that depend on them,” said Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Fishermen aren’t happy about the plan either.

If Obama were truly invested in reorganizing government, he would have proposed something earlier than in primary season, he would have proposed something more ambitious, and he would have offered the Republicans something of political value in exchange for giving him something of political value. Rarely has an attempt to reorganize Washington been so disorganized.

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After the Obama reorg goes through, Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com will be handled by Interior and my Twitter feed will be overseen by Commerce. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns and subscribe to this hand-built RSS feed for corrections to my column.

PHOTO: U.S. President Barack Obama speaks about government reform at the White House in Washington, January 13, 2012. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

New York Times Public Editor Arthur Brisbane made a huge mistake in his morning blog item titled “Should the Times Be a Truth Vigilante?” for which the Web has been punishing him all day. Brisbane’s mistake wasn’t to bring up the topic of how much time, space and effort reporters should commit to truth-squadding the iffy stuff that oozes out of the mouths of politicians, other notables and their spokesmen.

It’s a worthy topic. Brisbane’s mistake was to pose the topic as question — as if a journalist with his sort of experience didn’t know what the correct answer is — and then to stupidly ask and re-ask the question in the final paragraphs of his item, as if he were Phil Donahue with microphone in hand, rushing up and down the carpeted stairway eager to collect comments from the studio audience.

The awesome stupidity of Brisbane’s blog inspired prominent citizens of Twitterville, as well as Salon’s Alex Pareene, HuffPo’s Jason Linkins, Poynter’s Craig Silverman, New York University’s Jay Rosen, and Boing Boing’s Rob Beschizza, to take up their keyboards. “Should the New York Times — America’s ‘newspaper of record’ — print the truth?” is how Pareene restated Brisbane’s question in his lede. “Brisbane’s job is to embarrass the NY Times for its shortcomings, not to become one of them,” tweeted Village Voice Editor Tony Ortega.

Brisbane sought to quell the fury sparked by his 500-word post in correspondence with Jim Romenesko, who asked Brisbane what the hell he was getting at. He responded:

What I was trying to ask was whether reporters should always rebut dubious facts in the body of the stories they are writing. I was hoping for diverse and even nuanced responses to what I think is a difficult question. …

I was also hoping to stimulate a discussion about the difficulty of selecting which “facts” to rebut, facts being troublesome things that seem to shift depending on the beholder’s perspective.

Stimulate a discussion! Well, yes, Arthur, not even Phil Donahue could have stimulated a more intense discussion of how bulky and numerous the knots in your skull are today.

Brisbane deserved the abuse for writing without thinking, but those who think Brisbane prefers stenography to journalism should seek his back pages. I don’t think I’ve ever met Brisbane, but I recall reading his work closely when he was a Metro reporter for the Washington Post in the mid-1980s and I was editor of Washington City Paper. Brisbane was a skeptical, thorough reporter, and his coverage of Mayor-for-Life Marion Barry often sharpened the knife that we at City Paper would use to slice Hizzoner up. Instead of climbing the Post ladder of success, he returned to Kansas City and climbed the ladder there, eventually becoming editor of the Kansas City Star. I’m not familiar with his work as editor, but it’s safe to assume that he didn’t publish press releases as news.

Part of the outrage against Brisbane is theatrical. It’s fun to excoriate the Times. I’ve made a career out of it! But Brisbane has no power outside of the bully pulpit that the paper gives him. He speaks for himself, not the Times, as the paper endlessly reminds those who ask. But because editors and reporters generally don’t have the guts to take abuse directly from readers, they employ ombudsmen and public editors like Brisbane as their shields: The ombudsman exists primarily to take in the face whatever rotten fruit, bean balls and shards of broken glass that angry readers want to heave at the editors and reporters who produce the newspaper. The ombudsman is a safety valve that prevents reader fury from exploding, a way for the newspaper to say “we listen.” And today, as the gashes on his face prove, Brisbane is earning his pay.

At the risk of being the ombudsman’s ombudsman, what he was trying to ask his readers was how much time and effort the Times should put into refuting or contesting every flawed expression of “fact” that they come across when writing about newsmakers. Of course, Brisbane did himself no favor by labeling the aggressive refutation of squirrelly facts as “truth vigilantism” in his headline.

But to be fair to Brisbane — and I promise not to make this a habit — I think he was asking how fully reporters must tweeze every utterance spoken by newsmakers. Politics teems with gray areas and half-truths. If a reporter were to investigate every assertion of fact — assuming that that’s possible on deadline — the story he was supposed to be working on would dissolve into pixel dust. Infinite skepticism is swell, but it requires infinite fact-checking, and who has time for that? There’s a longstanding joke among journalists about what an infinitely vetted wedding announcement would look like: “A couple representing itself as Mr. and Mrs. John Smith say they hosted a reception Saturday, to commemorate what they claimed was the marriage of their son, in an apartment on Park Avenue that they assert they own.” As Edgar Allan Poe once put it, we crave “journalism in lieu of dissertation.”

Then, late today, Brisbane dug himself in a little deeper with a new post, claiming that his stupid questions had been misunderstood. I’ve read this post a dozen times and can’t figure out what he’s trying to say other than that he’s still looking for “reasoned discussion.” I urge Brisbane to forget about the reasoned discussion and start over with a blank screen — and not to ask stupid questions he doesn’t have the answers for.
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Has opposition research finally reached a big fat dead end?

Not that there is no fresh dirt to dig up on candidates. Each day, the morning editions bring us additional sleaze, flip-flops, and embarrassments from the candidates’ pasts, some of which comes ladled from oppo-researcher notebooks. We learn about our candidates’ legislative histories, their leveraged buyout histories (that would be you, Mitt and Newt), their adventures on K Street (take a bow, Newt and Rick #2), the filth and fury discovered in their back pages (hello, Ron!), the casual racism of a parent (Rick #1), and their military resumes (if they have one). And if they’ve generated any sort of paper trail from tax liens, divorce proceedings, campaign-finance filings, or civil actions—or if there is reusable disgrace from past campaigns—we read and re-read all about it, too.

But how much of this stuff actually sticks anymore? Beyond the undoing of Herman Cain’s candidacy by an avalanche of romancing-while-married stories, it’s hard to imagine any campaign revelation that, by itself, could burn any of the current candidates out of the current race or remain sufficiently hot to scald them in November’s general election. Dirt just doesn’t stain like it once did. (Even if some of this dirt sticks, it won’t alter the outcome for candidates like Rick Perry. The worst that could happen for him is to go from 1 percent to 0 percent support.)

That’s not how the political operatives feel. Today, Talking Points Memo reports how bummed the Democrats are that Newt Gingrich has already attacked Romney with the Bain story. Democrats had been holding Bain in reserve to use against Romney in the general election—as they did in 1994 in his race against Sen. Edward Kennedy (D, Mass.)—to portray Romney as a vulture capitalist of the most craven sort.

The past no longer matters to the political present the way it once did, because we have such better access to it today. Just 15 years ago, investigations of politicians and opposition research were largely limited to professionals with access to Lexis-Nexis or those who knew how to conduct a document search at the county courthouse. Digging dirt back then was like mining gold in the 1800s: labor intensive, and requiring both expertise and expensive tools. Widespread digitization and cheap information technologies haven’t eliminated the professionals from political dirt digging, only lowered the barriers to entry.

Leaping over those low barriers this cycle is Andrew Kaczynski, a 22-year-old history major at St. John’s University, who quarried C-SPAN archives for political gotchas and posted more than 160 of them on his YouTube channel, alerting the press to the best, he tells me.

“Once the channel took off I really didn’t need to send them to anyone because [they] could just go to my page and click refresh and see my latest upload,” Kaczynski says.

By December, Kaczynski’s diligent work on Romney, Paul, and Gingrich had earned him short profiles in New York and the New York Observer and an appearance on Howard Kurtz’s Reliable Sources. He quickly landed a job at BuzzFeed, where he now burrows into the political archives for a living. Today he posted a lovely cap-and-trade flip-flop by Jon Huntsman.

Kaczynski’s skill at dragging skeletons—and a few chicken bones—out of politicians’ closets indicates that soon, everything in a politician’s fossil record that can be retrieved will be retrieved– whether it be by oppo researchers, journalists, activists, or citizens–and put on display: Every utterance, every court filing, every public transaction, every burp, every miscue. By the time the technology really gets kicking, the new transparency will make Kim Kardashian look like a privacy hound.

Under the old rules, the only good defense to oppo research has been a good offense. In a recent Reuters piece, opposition researcher Jeff Berkowitz advised campaigns to conduct preemptive oppo-research (“vulnerability studies”) so they can develop a “response matrix” to repel anticipated attacks. Romney, as TPM notes, had kept his Bain defenses refreshed, knowing the issue would resurface.

But the velocity and volume of revelations coming out of Campaign 2012 suggest that oppo-defense won’t be able to keep pace with oppo research much longer, especially for politicians like Gingrich who have been in the game for four decades. Maybe it won’t happen this campaign, but I can see the day that a complete documentation on every politician of note, produced on the Web in Wikipedia fashion, would make opposition research redundant. When that day comes, we’ll finally be able to see our candidates in full and see that nearly every one of them has flip-flopped; made a fortune from either honest graft or dishonest graft; mistreated, divorced, or cheated on a spouse; taken drugs; lied; cheated; violated taboos; told dirty, racist, or otherwise tasteless jokes; stretched the fabric of the campaign finance laws; associated with bad people; engaged in resume inflation; taken dubious payments; or otherwise transgressed—just like you.

When the day of the Super Dossier comes, and it may even come by 2016, the power of the Web will teach us that nobody has enough character (Nixon? Clinton? GWB?) to be president. At that point, maybe all this standard human frailty will have become sufficiently normalized that we’ll have to pick our chief executive based on the policies and programs he binds himself to pursuing.

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A word to the wise: If you’re working inside government, be careful about doing oppo research while on the clock. Authorities busted Pennsylvania state legislature employees for using state Nexis accounts to dig for dirt at the behest of Democrats in 2006. Send fresh dirt to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com and monitor my Twitter feed for my transgressions. Which are many. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns and subscribe to this hand-built RSS feed for corrections to my column.

PHOTO: Participants cross a mud obstacle during the Wild Boar Dirt Run (Wild Sau Dirt Run) in Laaben, 50 kilometers (31 miles) west of Vienna, October 22, 2011. REUTERS/Lisi Niesner

Except for providing political journalists with millable grist, what good are endorsements? Obviously, a presidential candidate can’t win his party’s nomination on the power of endorsements alone. If that were the case, as Vanity Fair‘s Todd S. Purdum pointed out last month, Al Gore’s anointment of Howard Dean in 2004 would have worked magic.

Yet candidates continue to whore for endorsements, and other politicians continue to give them for mysterious reasons. Take, for example, John McCain’s endorsement of Mitt Romney yesterday at a New Hampshire campaign stop. McCain doesn’t bother to mask his low regard for Romney, as the New York Times reports today in a piece about the event:

[T]he two men made little eye contact, even when Mr. Romney was introducing Mr. McCain. They shared a stiff, half-hug on stage, patting each other on the back in a perfunctory manner.

Placing the relationship in historical context, the Times explains that in 2008, when both men were running for president, McCain hissed that Romney would say anything to get elected. In a 2008 debate, Romney accused McCain of “dirty tricks” and McCain said Romney didn’t have “the experience and the judgment” to be commander-in-chief.

If endorsements were about reciprocity, McCain would have supported Jon Huntsman this year as Huntsman spurned fellow Mormon Romney in 2008 to support McCain. But endorsements aren’t a matter of deposit and withdrawal. They signal information—some of it quite useless—to the political universe about both the endorser and the endorsee.

According to Purdum, Gore gave Dean his seal of approval as an act of revenge against the Democratic establishment, which he thought had mistreated him in 2000. John Edwards gamed both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in 2008 to determine which candidate would give him the best job in exchange for his endorsement should they win the White House. (He chose Obama when the campaign was all but over.) But neither of these endorsements amounted to much. Gore had no organization to throw Dean’s way and Edwards had exhausted his, making the endorsers the only real beneficiaries of their actions.

Surveying the academic literature on political endorsement in a piece for Political Research Quarterly (“Who Wins Nominations and Why? An Updated Forecast of the Presidential Primary Vote,” pdf), Wayne P. Steger writes that endorsements by party elites “serve as cues to party activists, contributors, and the media as to who are the viable and desirable candidates.” These endorsements have real value if the endorser lends his fund-raising talents to the candidate, and attacks the candidate’s rivals, Steger states. Big-name endorsers can also be campaign assets if they go on the hustings for the candidate, talk to reporters and meet with voters.

Endorsements signal the electability candidate, which indicates that McCain’s endorsement would have meant a lot more to Huntsman, who is relatively unknown, than to Romney. But it’s too late to help Huntsman at this stage in the campaign. Viewed cynically—is there any other way?—McCain deliberately endorsed Romney too late, offering it weeks after it could have done Romney any good. This helps explain Romney’s thanks-a-lot-for-nothing-buddy body language at the campaign event. According to the Times, the McCain camp apparently leaked the “secret” endorsement, extracting even that limited value for their boss. If Romney had an ounce of principle, he would have rejected McCain’s nod.

But he doesn’t and he didn’t. Still, the McCain endorsement still has some value to Romney. Although this is Romney’s second run for the presidency, he still isn’t as well-known to the public as McCain, which means that the endorsement could potentially convey to the politically sheltered Romney’s ideological position inside the Republican field. The downside of the endorsement, of course, is that voters who already have a low opinion of McCain will use the new information to vote against Romney. If that doesn’t make your game-theory bunnies hop, how about this? Romney coveted the McCain endorsement not so much for its value to him but to block its potential value for another candidate.

If the contest for endorsements from other politicians translated to political success, Romney should be lapping the other candidates. The Associated Press reported last week that Romney had “collected more than 1,900 endorsements, including conservative activists and current and former elected officials in all 50 states. The list includes four governors, 48 House members and 11 senators.” No other candidate has come close, the AP concluded. That Romney has not broken away suggests that the endorsements 1) aren’t signaling Republican voters in the manner in which they were intended, 2) it’s too early in the campaign to feel the effect of the endorsements, or 3) endorsements are bunk.

Steger found in his research that the Republican elite is more likely to endorse, to do so earlier, and to unite around one or two candidates than is the Democratic elite. Steger, whose paper was published in 2007, found that “Republican elites … rally around a candidate very early in the invisible primary, and that candidate has become the nominee in every open Republican nomination since 1972.” (The “invisible primary” is the politicking that takes place before the Iowa caucus when voter interest is low and media coverage is scant. In 2008, Mike Huckabee won the Iowa caucus and John McCain won the New Hampshire primary.) In addition to speaking their minds for Romney, the Republican elite’s wallets have spoken, too. According to the AP today, Romney has collected $32 million in individual contributions compared to Ron Paul’s $12 million, Newt Gingrich’s $3 million, and Rick Santorum’s $1 million.

The contempt McCain and Romney have for one another, as demonstrated in their 2008 debate clash and which time has not healed, makes a mockery of yesterday’s endorsement. In that sense, it’s not much different than any of the other endorsement of convenience the opportunistic politicians trot out this time of the season.

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I seek your endorsement at Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. My Twitter had a great invisible primary. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns and subscribe to this hand-built RSS feed for corrections to my column.

PHOTO: Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney is joined by U.S. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) at a campaign stop in Manchester, New Hampshire January 4, 2012, one day after Romney won the Iowa caucus.   REUTERS/Brian Snyder

The jobs of political reporters and sports writers are almost identical: Determine who is ahead and who is behind; get inside the heads of the participants; decode the relevant strategies and tactics; and find a way to convert reader interest into sustainable enthusiasm. Then, maintain reader enthusiasm for the months and months of caucuses or preseason games, primaries or regular season games, conventions or playoffs, and the general election or Super Bowl (or World Series).

So elemental is this eternal connection between sports and politics that even underdog presidential candidate Rick Perry gets it.

“The only scoreboard that matters is tomorrow, and it’s the scoreboard when the caucuses meet and we win the big Iowa caucus tomorrow,” Perry told the cheering crowd at his final campaign rally yesterday, sounding like the coach of a broken-down wildcard NFL team.

It’s not that the Iowa caucus doesn’t matter to the long-term prospects of the Republican candidates. It does, but not that much. Last week, while trying to inflate the relevance of the Iowa caucus, ABC News had to admit how inessential the contest is. “The Iowa caucus has had about a 50 percent ‘success’ rate when it comes to predicting the nominee” from either party, the site reported. The reason we hear so much about the caucus is because it matters a lot to the press corps, which should—but doesn’t—downplay the event into something less meaningful than a coin toss.

Who to blame for Iowa? I hold Jules Witcover responsible because he touted in his 1977 book “Marathon: the Pursuit of the Presidency 1972-1976″ the vital role the caucus played in Jimmy Carter’s campaign in 1976: He finished second to an uncommitted slate but used that showing to declare “victory” in Iowa. Some pundits say Iowa helped make him front-runner and win in New Hampshire. Even if it’s true that Iowa was the secret to Carter’s eventual success, it’s hardly fair that we should be paying for his good luck 36 years later.

Charles P. Pierce, who has covered both sports and campaign politics and is now a writer at large at Esquire, told me from Iowa today that sports writers have a greater liberty to tell the truth than do political reporters. A sports writer, for example, will encounter little resistance from his editor when he submits a story that says a young shortstop has no chance to make the big leagues. But few experienced political reporters are allowed to treat hopeless candidates like Michele Bachmann that way until the day the candidate is forced to drop out of the race.

“You have to pretend,” Pierce said.

If they weren’t encouraged to pretend, political reporters would tell you to take an Iowa breather and wait for more consequential contests—such as the New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Florida primaries. Even sports writers pretend sometimes, notably around the time of the Olympics. If they were completely on the level they’d instruct fans to take an extended bathroom break between games. But the commercial demands on both kinds of news fill what should be dead air with speculation, minutiae, human interest, gossip, and commentary. One would think that readers and viewers would resent all the ephemera masquerading as news, but they actually seem to appreciate it! How else to interpret the high ratings for the Republican debates this year or, on the sports side, the proliferation of pre-game and post-game shows, or whole networks owned by and devoted to the NFL and MLB?

“Sports TV has become the template for political reporting,” Pierce said, comparing the spectacle of Iowa coverage to NFL Countdown.

Professional codes deter the sports writers and political reporters from rooting for their home team or their “home” candidate. But both still have a vested interest in their guys winning. The football writer hopes to ride his team’s wave all the way to the press box at the Super Bowl, where a book contract or something even better might ensue. The political reporter, whether he’s a Chicago Tribune reporter covering the Obama campaign in 2008 or a Boston Globe reporter assigned to Mitt Romney this year, not-so-secretly hopes his paper’s “home” candidate will win and he’ll get reassigned to the White House by his bosses or hired by the Washington Post or New York Times. On the cable dial, you can hear MSNBC hosts root for the Democrats just as clearly as you can hear Fox News hosts do the same for Republicans.

But journalists can be realists. “Do you want to be covering Michele Bachmann right now, or do you want to be with Romney and Paul?” said Washington Post reporter Paul Farhi, answering his own question. (Nobody wanted to cover the Indianapolis Colts this year, either.) Farhi, who has reported on business, sports, politics, and the media, says business coverage also obsesses on winners and numbers. “Maybe all journalism is about success and failure, and we see it more clearly in sports,” he said.

If something can be counted, it can be listed. If it can be listed, you can be sure it has been. Compare, for example, the San Diego Union-Tribune‘s five things to watch in last year’s Super Bowl with Politico’s five things to watch in Iowa from today. Guess which list instructs its readers to watch for “game changers” and “center of attention,” which insists that “not all ground games are equal,” or which talks about what will happen “if the weather is bad”?

The campaign has to start somewhere and, for reasons too arbitrary to explore here, it starts in Iowa. We can thank the Iowa caucus for breaking in the candidates, for seasoning inexperienced reporters, and for conditioning press veterans for the coming long haul. But the dirty little secret is that even though 1,500 members of the press corps are there right now covering the story, Iowa hardly matters. If you blinked, you didn’t really miss it.

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PHOTO: Supporters of U.S. Republican presidential candidate and Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) attend a campaign stop in Cedar Falls, Iowa, January 2, 2012. The Iowa Caucus will be held on January 3. REUTERS/Jim Young