Jack Shafer

Having secured the nominations of their parties, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have set their campaign throttles to late-spring idle with a speech here, a speech there, a commencement address over there, and fundraisers and soft TV appearances everywhere. Eventually, the two candidates will stop coasting, but until they do, reporters will continue to lard their work with exercises in meta-journalism, such as today’s 1,800-word Politico piece, “Obama and Romney’s common foe.”

The common foe, don’t you know, is the press! According to Politico’s Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush, Barack and Mitt both “disdain” the “political news media” because they believe reporters are “eager to vaporize them for the sheer sport of it.”

Is there anything new about presidents and presidential candidates having bad feelings for the press? Does nobody recall John McCain’s low regard for the New York Times coverage of his 2008 campaign? Or of George W. Bush’s attitude toward the press? Bill Clinton’s scorn? George H.W. Bush’s hatred? Carter’s? Nixon’s? Johnson’s? Sometimes candidates do charm the press, as McCain did in 2000, and the anti-war candidates of 1968 and 1972, but it’s the exception, never the rule.

No, there is nothing new about presidents and presidential candidates having bad feelings about the press, something the Politico piece readily admits. As Haberman and Thrush write: “Media-hating has been an occupational hazard among presidential candidates for decades, and it’s deeply self-serving.”

Then, Haberman and Thrush abandon the idea of media-hating being a campaign constant in their next paragraph, writing: “But 2012 is shaping up to be an especially sour cycle for the campaigns and the media, amplifying the natural tension between candidates and the press in the absence of an uplifting storyline.”

Attacking Politico for contradicting itself or for confusing a lightning bug with lightning (hat tip to Mr. Twain) may seem to be a fool’s errand. The people who edit and write for the site know good journalism from bad, but that self-knowledge doesn’t prevent them from serving half-baked, rancid dishes like this. Politico, which has become influential and ubiquitous in our political culture, depends on patrons like me to send entrees like this back to the kitchen and to summon the health inspector to do his thing. Only then can America be safe.

The evidence presented by Politico that this campaign is “shaping up to be especially sour” is so thin it almost vanishes. Obama has said vague things about being disappointed by the press, such as in his commencement address at Barnard College, and he delivered a cheap shot about Huffington Post’s aggressive aggregation in his White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner speech. But that hardly constitutes press hatred. Straining to come up with material, the Politico piece quotes David Plouffe’s The Audacity to Win, the Obama adviser’s 2009 memoir about the 2008 campaign, on press-candidate relations. Exactly how Plouffe’s views on his candidate’s relations with the press in the last campaign help show candidate-press relations approaching some new “sourness” plateau in this campaign is not explained.

Indeed, it shows that Politico doesn’t really have the goods to prove its thesis, as the piece zigs back to note that there is at least one outlet the president admires: An anonymous “onetime Obama press adviser” tells Haberman and Thrush that Obama “likes the New York Times,” which he thinks is “serious” as opposed to “the rest of you guys.” Also, Obama told Rolling Stone that he read all the Times columnists.

Perhaps Politico has conflated Obama’s dislike of Politico into a hatred of the entire press corps? I hope Haberman and Thrush pursue this angle with the anonymous onetime Obama press adviser.

Establishing that Romney hates the press should be a cinch, but Politico doesn’t even try. It reports that Ann Romney didn’t like a 1994 profile done on her by the Boston Globe during Mitt’s failed run for the Senate. That would be admissible evidence if Politico were attempting to show that 1994 was the nastiest year in press-candidate relations, but that’s not what the site is up to here, is it? It also tells us that Romney “walled” himself off from beat reporters during the primary campaign, that he has kept reporters off his “rope line” to prevent them from asking questions, that his camp thinks the Washington Post story about his Cranbrook days was a hit job, that he dislikes the extreme scrutiny (such as what brand of jeans he’s wearing) and that he has a “handful of favorites” in the press, including Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin. This sounds less like conflict to me than baseline candidate-press relations.

As presented by Politico, Romney’s most urgent media problem isn’t the conventional press, it’s the world of conservative bloggers, “who view him as a moderate,” as well as other conservative writers. Only Politico would dare conflate a Republican candidate’s inability to please conservative bloggers and conservative writers into confirmation of a candidate’s poor relations with the press.

Veteran White House reporter James Deakin posited the inevitability of confrontations between the president and the press in his 1984 book Straight Stuff: The Reporters, the White House, and the Truth and documented them in their many flavors. Likewise, presidential candidates and the press are equally apt to mix it up, and do, as readers of Teddy White and his successors have learned.

When Politico asserts that “Romneyland, like Obamaland, is inherently mistrustful of the press corps,” it’s hardly breaking news. Of course Romneyland and Obamaland are inherently mistrustful of the press corps, as were Santorumland, Gingrichland and Perryland, and for good reason. It’s the job of the press to expose things about candidates that they would rather not have you hear.

As a practical matter, voters and readers need never worry about the state of candidate-press relations. Until, of course, the unfortunate day comes when Politico reports everybody is getting along swell.

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It’s not the job of the press to be liked by anybody. Or did I make that point already. Send your hate-the-press notes to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. There’s plenty in my Twitter feed to dislike. 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: President Barack Obama’s teleprompter, with the White House press corps in the foreground, shown in the East Room of the White House in Washington, September 10, 2010.  REUTERS/Jason Reed

Could David Brooks, Frank Bruni and Joe Nocera be any more disappointed with the Republican Party? Over the last week, the three New York Times columnists have written op-eds about how miserable the ultra-Republicanness of the Republican Party establishment has made life for moderate Republican officeholders.

In his piece, which riffs off of a Times news story by Jonathan Weisman, Brooks sets the tone for his page, uncorking a sluice of tears not just for moderate Republican Sen. Richard Lugar but for conservative Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch, both of whom have had to swing “sharply to the right to fend off primary challengers” from the “wingers.” The “wingers,” as Brooks calls them, “have zero tolerance for the compromises needed to get legislation passed.” The winger campaign is guided by “grievance politics, identity politics,” he writes, and they “have trashed the party’s reputation by swinging from one embarrassing and unelectable option to the next: Bachmann, Trump, Cain, Perry, Gingrich, Santorum.”

The wingers are “ferocious,” “extreme,” “metastasizing,” conductors of “heresy trials” (the presidential debates!), “meshugana,” and creators of “insular information loops,” Brooks continues.

After the Brooks piece ran, the ur-moderate Republican, Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, announced she wouldn’t seek re-election this fall, which prompted the liberal Bruni to write a celebration of her 33-year career in Congress. Bruni confesses a “kind of crush” on Snowe, one he says he shared with other Capitol Hill reporters. “We liked her best for her disobedience,” he writes, her rejection of her “political tribe’s often tyrannical orthodoxy.”

Last came Nocera, who reprised the points made by Brooks, Bruni and Weisman to make his: that he was rooting for Rick Santorum to win the Republican nomination so that the party would take such a beating in the general election that its “extremist” faction would abandon its “ideological rigidity” and the party would turn to the “endangered species” of moderate Republicans, like Christine Todd Whitman and Lincoln Chafee.

So large is Brooks, Bruni and Nocera’s enthusiasm for the endangered species of moderate Republicans that I half expected their pieces to end with a proposal for a breeding and reintroduction program, lest the extreme Republicans drive the moderates into permanent extinction.

None of the pieces really makes the case for why a less ideological Republican Party would mean a better Congress or a better country, unless conviviality, the building of congressional coalitions and the steady passage of new legislation are the supreme measures of improvement. Mostly, the Times op-ed troika transcribed their Christmas wish list, the first item being that they want the Republican Party to become more like the Democratic Party. But you can’t put ideological realignment of the party you oppose on your Christmas wish list. It’s up to the party faithful and the voters to determine what sort of party they will become, right? Liberals like Bruni remind me of an ex-girlfriend of mine who wanted to order her entrée and my entrée when we went out so she could maximize her dining options.

Of course, it’s kosher for a partisan pundit or politician to agitate for a change in the leadership of the opposing party, or a catastrophic showing in the presidential election, as Nocera does, or even call for its dissolution. But when Nocera cites the disastrous presidential campaigns of George McGovern (1972) and Walter Mondale (1984) as examples of liberal crack-ups that caused the Democratic Party to swing back to a Clintonian center, and argues that the Republicans would benefit from a similar course-correcting calamity, perhaps he picks the wrong parallel. Was it not the catastrophic defeat of Republican “extremist” Barry Goldwater in 1964 that resulted in the building of the conservative cadre and the victory by Ronald Reagan in 1980? In other words, even if Nocera’s short-term wish comes true, it’s no sure thing that his long-term hope will also become reality.

Perhaps Brooks has enough credibility as a conservative to enter the debate over which path the Republicans should take. But Frank Bruni? That would be like heeding a plea from George F. Will that what the Democratic Party really needs is some more Blue Dogs.

The primary flaw of the extreme-Republicans-out-of-control argument is that even the “wingers” are nowhere near as doctrinaire as the Times columnists would have you believe. Last week in the Washington Examiner, columnist Timothy P. Carney took a hammer to Brooks’s notion of Republican rigidity. “Someone should show Brooks the GOP presidential field,” he writes. “The ever-changing policy views of front-runner Mitt Romney can be derided in many ways, but never as ‘rigid.’ Nor can the mercurial Newt Gingrich be pinned down as unbending.”

As for Santorum, Carney recalls his rescue of moderate Arlen Specter in 2004. Specter “who would have lost the GOP primary to conservative Pat Toomey that year if not for Santorum’s tireless campaigning.” Smart move or stupid? As Carney notes, Specter left the party in 2009 and gave the Democrats the 60 votes they needed to pass Obamacare.

Putting all of our bickering and political differences aside to work together doesn’t necessarily result in civic nirvana. Fans of the cooperative, non-partisan political spirit should remember legislative travesties like the USA Patriot Act, which was passed as quickly as it was introduced.

For decades, pundits and politicians complained that there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between the two main political parties. Now that there’s a nickel’s worth of difference, they want to reverse the 50 years of ongoing realignment of the two parties, both of which once contained liberals, moderates and conservatives, into two parties, one of mostly liberals and the other of mostly conservatives. If the sorting hat of American politics has accomplished that, Brooks, Bruni and Nocera will have to do more than compose irate op-eds to reverse it. Did the 1970s versions of Brooks, Bruni and Nocera bemoan the exile of Southern conservatives from the Democratic Party to the wilderness of the Republican Party? I’ll bet not.

Writing in the Atlantic four years ago, Matthew Yglesias identified the journalistic resistance to political polarization. “[T]he resulting system is tragically dull. Legislative outcomes become a simple matter of vote-counting: either a party has a majority or it doesn’t. There’s little room for journalistic sleuthing,” he writes, before enumerating the upside for voters. When the parties turn rigid, ideological and doctrinaire, voters have less trouble figuring out what the candidates actually stand for.

Republicans denouncing Republicans sounds terrible when you read about it in the press, but it’s a logical product of any primary election. The last time I checked, primaries, for all their shortcomings, were created to enhance democracy by removing the selection of candidates from the smoke-filled room and presenting it to the voters.
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Moderates and roadkill are the only things that dare rest in the middle of the road. Send your political roadkill recipes to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com and savor my Twitter feed. 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 Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum speaks at a campaign rally at the American Legion post in Westerville, Ohio, May 5. REUTERS/Jim Young

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

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

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

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

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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Blink or wink with email to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. My Twitter feed is almost completely free of sports clichés. 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: 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

Just what the country needed: Another political Web site.

At the beginning of the week, ABC News launched OTUS, its political news supermarket with its top political reporters (Jake Tapper, Jonathan Karl, Amy Walter, and George Stephanopoulos) hunkering on the site’s home page. OTUS threatens to dice, grind, sieve, and aerosol the complex business of campaigns and the affairs of the state into inhalable powder.

As Tapper says in this promo, OTUS (short for of the United States as in, POTUS, president of the United States, or SCOTUS, supreme court of the United States) is all about the “power moves, the mini-dramas, the scheming” in politics. Tapper promises that OTUS will flag both the “urgent and the ridiculous,” offer games, display correspondents’ Twitter feeds, and create a stock market-style ticker that assesses the rising and falling worth of candidates with social media.

ABC News has expanded its Web efforts at what is obviously a late date. Salon, Slate, Talking Points Memo, Yahoo Politics, Politico, RealClearPolitics, Red State, Huffington Post Politics, FiveThirtyEight, Mother Jones, National Review Online, Daily Beast, Daily Caller, Roll Call, The Hill, CNN Politics, NBC’s First Read, Time ‘s Swampland, National Journal, specialty sections at the Washington Post, the New York Times, New York magazine, the Associated Press, Bloomberg News, and Reuters, as well as numerous other sites already cover the beat, and cover it well.

That ABC News would join the specialists speaks to both the audience’s insatiable appetite for political news and the network’s confidence that nobody owns this market. It’s a good call: Such is the Web audience’s fickleness, the ease with which they can skip pages, that nobody can own the market for news anymore. They can’t even rent it. News organizations can’t own their journalistic stars the way they used to, either. In the old days, the only place for a reporter or editor at a top-tier newspaper or magazine to migrate was another top-tier newspaper or magazine, or maybe a TV network, or maybe a career in books. But not anymore. Reporters now move from the New York Times to the Huffington Post with such regularity that the MTA is thinking of digging a special subway line to accommodate them.

Not to oversell the current scene, but the proliferation of political news sites—and my apologies to those I didn’t name—means we’re living in a bit of a golden age of political reporting. At least when it comes to national politics and national government, there have never been more reporters competing to break news. Not everything on the menu tastes great, but there’s no denying it’s a feast.

If the winners are readers, the losers are the Times, the Post, and the evening news broadcasts, which have lost their quasi-monopoly power over political coverage, and especially the print versions of the newsweeklies, which specialized for so many decades at giving the quanta of political news a narrative context. Ned Martel, who covers politics for the Post, says it wasn’t that long ago that how much you knew about Washington was measured by how many pages in the last issue of the print version National Journal you’d turned. Also taking a hit has been the political press; The New Republic, which went from weekly to fortnightly in 2007, in part because they didn’t have the money to sustain a weekly any more and in part because weekly was no longer frequent enough to stay on top of politics. The job of wrapping politics into comprehensive narratives now belongs to the monthlies like Vanity Fair and the Atlantic or books like Game Change and Renegade.

Other winners include the cable news chat shows and the Sunday morning programs, which gorge on the baitball of Web news like hungry yellowfin tuna. The cycle is completed when the Web news hounds attack the baitbail formed by the chat show chat, and the chat shows eventually dine, somewhat cannibalistically, on the remains.

For political journalists, this is the best of all possible worlds. They’ve gained new leverage over their editors, who in the green-eyeshade days of journalism could use their power of the limited number of column-inches available in print to cut and otherwise simplify their stories. Now, with there being no shortage of space to fill, the writer calls the shots and the editor, fearful that he’ll get the blame if he’s beaten by the competition, is more likely to approve stories he might once have dismissed as too technical, too inside baseball, and too complicated for a news outlet. (“Save it for your book, kid.”)

Thus liberated, the political journalist can write at wire-service speed, even availing himself to tiny microbursts of reporting, while dumping many of the conventions that make wire reporters miserable—such as the inverted news pyramid that puts the most important news at the top so that distant newspaper editors can cut two, three, four, or five paragraphs at the bottom to make it fit their pages.

The newly liberated political journalist need no longer dumb down his story so that everybody can understand it. He can point to explanatory information with a link or skip it all together, figuring that anybody who is reading him already knows what the Federal Reserve Bank is and what it does. (You laugh, but I recall Washington Post stories from the past that paused to define “pinata” and “slam dunk” when it used those phrases metaphorically!) As victors over their beaten-down editors, political writers can now insert humor, opinion, history lesson, minutiae, and policy wonkery in their pieces without having to justify the digressions and elaborations. (Of course, another part of the new culture can be, depending on the outlet, lower salaries and reduced job security. But that’s my problem and that of my colleagues, not yours.)

Not that long ago, Ben Bagdikian was publishing the seventh edition of his book-length argument, The Media Monopoly. Bagdikian’s neverending gripe was that the news business was consolidating into fewer and fewer voices, and that government action was needed to break up newspapers, magazines, and broadcasters. We don’t hear much of that talk anymore–you’re more likely to hear people complaining about too much political news. The current state of our political press ain’t perfect, but when the exemplar of the new order is Ezra Klein and not Joe Klein, how bad can it be?

Welcome, OTUS, you goofy-named little bastard. I hope you have a good 2012.

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By Jack Shafer
The opinions expressed are his own.

In case you haven’t heard, the 2012 presidential election is already over and the Republicans stole it. Both Rolling Stone and Mother Jones report this week that those wascally Wepublicans have already walked away with the ballot boxes.

The Rolling Stone piece (Sept. 15, 2011) finds evidence of an “unprecedented, centrally coordinated campaign to suppress the Democratic vote that elected Barack Obama in 2008.”  Comparing the Republican efforts to suppress the vote to the Jim Crow-era poll taxes and literacy tests erected by Dixiecrats, writer Ari Berman claims that a “dozen states have approved new obstacles to voting.” By “obstacles” Berman means new laws requiring proof of citizenship in Kansas and Alabama; the repeal of Election Day voter registration in Maine; shortened early voting periods in Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee, and West Virginia; and the presentation of government-issued ID before casting ballots in Alabama, Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin, as well as other new voting measures.

As clampdowns go, these measures seem too anemic to support the Rolling Stone‘s hysterical headline, “The GOP War on Voting,” but it is no journalistic crime to over-promise and under-deliver on a piece, especially a political piece.

Mother Jones’s less wiggy article, by Nick Baumann, explains how Pennsylvania’s Republican state legislators are “pushing a scheme” to change the way the state’s Electoral College votes are cast from winner-take-all to winner by congressional district (two votes would go to the state-wide contest winner). The horror of the plan, Baumann writes, is that it’s legal. It’s also constitutional—Nebraska and Maine cast their votes this way, he writes, and it could cost President Barack Obama a second term in a close election.

Whatever might be said about these charges, they are certainly not “unprecedented.” Fears of a stolen election are as old as American politics and as contemporary as the last big contest. In 2008′s third presidential campaign debate, John McCain declared that ACORN was “now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.”  In October 2008, Rolling Stone published a feature whose thesis was similar to the current piece, titled “Block the Vote: Will the GOP’s campaign to deter new voters and discard Democratic ballots determine the next president?” By the time the froth on both sides dried, nobody uncovered evidence of either an ACORN or Republican coup d’etat.

At the risk of sounding like the moderating voice of reason, I’d like to point out that the Republican efforts to “suppress the Democratic vote” aren’t quite as demonic and unfair as Rolling Stone makes them out to be. Of course, Republicans want as few potential Democratic voters to cast ballots as possible, and will shout “Vote fraud!” if that makes their case more persuasive. That’s politics. Democrats want as many potential Democratic voters to cast ballots as possible, and they don’t particularly care if those Democrats are double registered or otherwise ineligible as long as nobody finds out. That’s politics, too, a point that historian Alexander Keyssar makes repeatedly in the 2006 2000 book The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States.

Any effort to uncouple politics from the way that voters are registered, votes are cast, and votes are counted is foolhardy, because the whole enterprise is political and always has been. “Federalists and then Whigs tended to favor longer periods of residence,” Keyssar writes of politics in early 19th century America, “because they were wary of the unsettled and the poor and suspected that most transients would vote for Republicans or Democrats. The Democrats shared this analysis, advocating shorter residency requirements in the hope of enfranchising more of their own supporters.”

Rolling Stone makes a big deal out of the fact that the feds convicted only 86 people of voter fraud between 2002 and 2007. But the lack of prosecution doesn’t mean widespread voter fraud doesn’t exist. In 2004, journalist Bill Gifford compiled these hilarious examples of non-partisan voter fraud for Slate.

The Orlando Sentinel found that 68,000 Florida voters are also registered in Georgia or North Carolina (the only two states it checked), 1,650 of whom voted twice in 2000 or 2002. The Kansas City Star discovered 300 “potential” cases of individual voter fraud, including Kansans voting in Missouri and St. Louisans voting in both the city and the surrounding suburbs.

At the risk of sounding like a Republican, I direct you to the data collected by the United States Elections Project at George Washington University, which indicates that “suppressing” the potential Democratic vote in such Electoral College vote-rich states as California, Texas, Florida, New York, and Illinois could be a worthy, democratic initiative. According to the Elections Project, almost 20 percent of  the voting-age population in California in 2006 was ineligible to vote because of their lack of citizenship or other reasons. In Texas, the figure was 16.34 percent; in Florida, 13.47 percent; in New York, 13.21 percent; in Illinois, 9.72 percent. In the average state, about 7 percent of its voting-age population is ineligible to vote.

So when Republicans deploy their “suppressive” measures in California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois—and other places in which the ineligible are found in profusion—you can make like a Democrat and complain that their efforts are disenfranchising whole populations that have a right to vote. Or you can make like a Republican and claim that the GOP is protecting the sanctity of votes cast by the eligible by making it harder for the ineligible to register.

Or, you can make like the moderating voice of reason—me—and have it both ways, simultaneously supporting and protesting the Republicans’ war on voting.

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Disclosure: The 2011 Rolling Stone article notes that the Koch brothers help fund the American Legislative Exchange Council, which designs legislation “to impede voters at every step of the electoral process.” I worked for almost three years in the early 1980s for Inquiry magazine, which was funded by the Kochs. Cast your ballot for or against this piece with email to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. This hand-built RSS feed rings every time a Shafer correction is filed.

PHOTO: Voters cast their ballots at the Super Suds laundry in Long Beach, California November 2, 2010. REUTERS/Phil McCarten