More Debate Ramblings

This photo, copyrighted by The Associated Press, shows an amicable Tommy and Tammy shaking hands before their last “debate” Friday night at the Marquette Law School Library.  Moderator Mike Gousha’s hand is just visible in the lower left of the photo.

I think it’s safe to say Tammy and Tommy won’t be shaking hands again in the near future, if they can avoid it.  This Senate campaign has ended up in the muck, and both are throwing it.

Some people who’ve known Tommy for a long time say he reluctantly went along with Karl Rove’s attack ad on Tammy’s 9-11 Patriotism; some who’ve known Tammy a long time say she had no option but to counter Tommy’s 9-11 smear with one of her own.

This is what politics has become: both candidates with their own sets of facts, who refuse to directly answer questions about specifics, and simply repeat whatever lines their handlers have told them to use when talking about the subject.  You can’t pin them down; even when a competent moderator like Mike Gousha asks Tommy directly about his pandering to the tea party with his remark to the tea people “who better than me to do away with Medicare and Medicaid?”  Tommy just pivots and says “I’ve been a moderate conservative all my life”.

Both Tommy and Tammy could benefit greatly by hiring an elocution coach; Tammy more than Tommy.  Tommy’s tortured pronunciations and shattered syntax are part and parcel of his very well-known public persona, and a well-spoken Tommy Thompson might even be a net negative.  We’re used to his bluster and his dropped g’s and his repeated mispronunciations (“Ahmadeenajon”) and constant flubs like “Gulf of Hormuz”.

Tammy’s not nearly so well-known in Wisconsin, and her halting answers and constant interjections of “ahhh…” make her responses to debate questions seem uncertain.  In the closing moments of Friday night’s debate, when Gousha got to the 9-11 (non)issue, Tommy launched into an obviously well-practiced response about not questioning Tammy’s patriotism, but her judgment.  Tammy’s “I am outraged that Governor Thompson would make a political issue of a national tragedy” speech, no doubt also calculated and practiced, came off as stilted and rehearsed.  Unfortunately, this is the kind of stuff – style elements, not substance – that tend to stick in the mind, and play too large a role in the decision-making process about who’s the better candidate.

Mercifully, the “debates” are now over; no more Tammy and Tommy; no more Barack and Mitt; and a creature named Sandy will take center stage on the national news reports for the next couple days.

The cynic in me buys into the assertion that we get the kind of government we deserve.

The Cult of Balance (Again)

Now that the Grey Lady (The New York Times) has taken up the discussion and developed new guidelines for its reporters regarding balance and false equivalence, it’s likely to become a very hot topic in mainstream journalism.

The analogy I like best, to explain false equivalence, is the one where someone (like, for instance, Michelle Bachman, although she did NOT say this) says “the earth is flat”, and the person running against her says “the earth is round”, and the news story is headlined “Opinions Vary on the Shape of the Earth” – as if both the flat earth statement and the round earth statement were of equal truth and value.

I’ve ranted several times in the past about the cult of journalists who believe every story must be balanced, particularly when politics is the topic, and they accept the nonsense being spewed by one person/candidate is being as valid as whatever’s being said by the opposition.

Complicating the issue in this Presidential election cycle is the fairly recent phenomenon that as Americans, we now have our own sets of “facts”.  We don’t agree and what is and what isn’t a fact, and we have the ability to expose ourselves to only one set of “facts”: Fox News and its ilk have one take on what’s fact and what isn’t; MSNBC and its ilk have a different, and often opposite take on what’s fact. We can select the information we consume to fit our bias.  Case on point: the birther issue.

It seems as a result of this recent “my facts aren’t your facts” phenomenon, fewer Americans, particularly those with deficient education, are not able to make an independent determination of what’s fact and what’s not.

Suppose you’re a reporter doing an interview with Tommy Thompson (or Paul Ryan), and he trots out the line about repealing Obamacare, which he characterizes as a government takeover of health care.  Do you let it slide? Politfact and many other reputable watchdog groups have clearly exposed the “takeover” line as bunk – Politfact called it “the biggest political lie of 2010”.  The Affordable Care Act is nothing near a “government takeover” – the government will not take over hospitals and clinics, the government will not put doctors and caregivers on the federal payroll, and on and on.  Do you stop Thompson (Ryan) and challenge him on the line right then and there?  Do you point out when reporting the story that the ACA is not a government takeover of health care?  Or, do you do what 99.445% of reporters do, and simply let the tape roll, because, after all, as your journalism professors taught you, it’s not YOU that’s making the false assertion, it’s the candidate?

When Paul Ryan spun his lie about the Janesville GM plant in his speech at the Republican Convention, he was caught immediately.  But today’s political tactic is to continue to tell the lie, again and again, regardless of how many times reporters call you on it.  Piers Morgan’s interview with Scott Walker the night after Ryan’s convention speech is quite instructive: Morgan essentially said to Walker “why the lie?” – and Walker simply repeated it – twice.  Is “Obama promised to keep the GM Janesville plant open” a true or false statement?  Now, the Ryanites have doubled-down on the falsehood, and are running a TV ad which infers Obama broke  promise to keep the plant open - even though the context of CANDIDATE Obama's quote clearly indicates the plant could stay open another hundred years IF General Motors would re-tool to make more fuel-efficient vehicles - an option GM decided not to take.

That’s why we don’t – and can’t – have political discourse any more.  We can’t agree on what’s a fact and what isn’t.

As a varsity debater in college, I learned the importance of defining terms.  Seems now we have to define facts.  And, since we can’t seem to agree on facts, we’ll remain divided and gridlocked.

The image at the top of this post is Copyright PolitiFact.

Tommy, Tammy, or Tea?

I have an idea that the U.S. Senate race between Tommy Thompson and Tammy Baldwin is about to get down in the mud.  WAY down in the mud.  Hope I’m wrong.

But if it does get down and dirty, I think I’ll enjoy watching the ads.  And I’ll even seek out ads that don’t run in the Madison market.

In some ways, what happened in the Republican primary is kind of like the old rule of radio programming, which goes something like “if you’re going to change format to compete with an existing station within that format, bring a large checkbook, and prepare to lose”. 

Tommy, Eric, and Mark (Fitz the lesser was never a factor) were all competing in the same format: conservative.  Tea People in the Fox Valley liked Eric better, and he won those counties.  Mark “Partial Birth Abortion” Neumann won….ah….I can’t remember, a couple counties way up north where they speak a different dialect of ‘sconnie.  And Tommy – well, Tommy flirted with the Tea Persons just enough to get them interested, and carried the vast majority of counties in the state.  Tommy was able to navigate the waters well enough to stay just far enough to the right….while keeping Eric and Mark to his right, causing a fractured vote that left none of them with a majority, but Tommy with enough votes to win.

Now that Tommy has vanquished his opponents, he can set his sights on destroying Tammy.  Quite a few of my lefty pals here in the bluest county in the state are whispering things like “why Tommy? Why not Eric? Jeez, Tammy, it’s Tommy Thompson.  Why didn’t you just stay in your seat in congress forever? The second district would have sent you back there every election, but now….you’ve got to beat Tommy.”

I believe Scot Klug would still hold the 2^nd Congressional seat if he wanted it, and hadn’t taken himself out of the race after his promised 8 years, and the seat which had been held by Bob Kastenmeier since the earth began to cool went back to a Democrat.  And Tammy’s held the seat since Klug gave it up.  But that was back in the days when bat-shit crazy didn’t fly with the electorate, like it often does now.

So Tammy – who will be positioned as a Dane County Liberal HOMOSEXUAL – will take on the guy who, if he isn’t the most popular politician in state history, is in the top 3.  Tommy is on first-name basis with folks in all 72 counties.  Tammy is on first-name basis with people in…oh, say three counties.

Pocan’s a lock for Tammy’s seat in congress;  but it’s gonna be real interesting to see how dirty the Tommy-Tammy race gets.

Should Advocacy Replace Journalism?

Watching the premiere of Aaron Sorkin’s “Newsroom” on HBO prompted some questions I’m still pondering.  The title of this post is one of them.  Jeff Daniels’ character is an irascible cable news anchor, prone to fits of pique and ready to issue a blistering rant at any moment.  During one of the rants, excoriating the current state of the news profession, Daniels’ character asserts that TV news has everything to do with entertainment and diversion, and not with facts, because today people chose their own set of facts.

The online publication “Gawker” asked Dan Rather – certainly one of my least favorite anchormen of all time – to watch the HBO show and comment.  Among other things, Dumb Dan said this of Sorkin’s portrayal of a TV newsroom, with the push and pull of whether or not what they’re doing matters: “It's a fight that matters, not just for journalists but for the country. It centers on whether news reporting is to be considered and practiced — to any significant degree, even a little — as a public service, in the public interest, or is to exist solely as just another money-making operation for owners of news outlets.”

Well-said, Dan.

There are plenty of reporters – national and local – who ferret out good stories and report them with little bias.  I’m referring to the straightforward stuff where facts are facts, and they’re not in dispute: somebody shot somebody, somebody wrecked their car and got hurt, the city council passed a new ordinance, a family needs financial help for an expensive operation for a child, a local company is expanding operations – those sort of stories that comprise the warp and woof of daily journalism.

But when it comes to getting at the truth of statements made by public officials, private business owners/managers, and certainly political candidates, I think Journalism has been falling down on the job for quite a while.  There’s a tendency to report anything an official, a spokesman, or a candidate says, as “fact”.  (The fact is, of course, they said it; I think we can trust nearly every reporter to get that part right.)  I have often used the lighthearted poke at Journalism that goes “Candidate X says the earth is flat; the story is headlined ‘Opinions on the shape of the earth vary’”.

No matter how stupid, inaccurate, or wrong the statement is, it’s reported – and repeated – unchallenged.  Many reporters will say it’s merely their job to report the news accurately, not to try and interpret it – that’s somebody else’s job.  And that’s where I begin to have some questions about that model.

Take the case of Tea Party darling Tommy Thompson, who is doing his best to remake his image as a cordial consensus-builder (and a HUGE tax-and-spender) into a tea party conservative.  Because he’s actually spent most of his time the past few years as a lobbyist for huge health care corporations, he’s doing his best to distance himself from the (accurate) image of being a “Washington insider” to being a regular fellow, just like you and me, who has knowledge about how the health care system works, and wants to reform it.

Here’s the image for Tommy’s online manifesto about health care – but note that whenever he talks about it, he refers to his position as “repealing Obama-Care”.  (He’ll do that all by himself, Tommy will, without the help of 99 other Senators or 435 Members of the House of Representatives.)

The first sentence of the second paragraph of Tommy’s health care reform plan contains a Republican Party position-line cooked up a few years ago by party operative Frank Luntz, that refers to the President’s plan as a “government takeover of health care”.  (Politfact calls that statement the biggest lie of 2010.)  Tommy parrots that line constantly in his TV ads and his stump speech.  To characterize President Obama’s health care reforms as a government takeover is complete horsepoop, because it’s no such thing by ANY definition.  The government will not take over hospitals and health care institutions, and doctors and nurses and health care professionals will not suddenly cease to be independent and become employees of the state.  It doesn’t even work that way in the “European Socialism Model” we’re constantly being warned about: doctors contract with health care providing organizations, but remain independent.

Tommy’s “market-based solution” is just as much hogwash.  The market doesn’t work, because insurers can turn you down for damn near any reason, and once one of them does, the others won’t touch you.  It’s not free-market, even if you take away the pre-existing condition argument.  It’s not like any other good or service that operates in a free market, where if one vendor turns you down, you can buy the item or service somewhere else.  So the health insurance racket is NOT a “free market” by any definition.  And, of course, Tommy prattles on about tort reform and not lining the pockets of the malpractice lawyers with millions of dollars in huge verdicts.  Suffice it to say Tommy’s plan is Paul Ryan dogma.

Back to the Journalism/advocacy question.

Shouldn’t a good reporter stop Tommy in his tracks when he starts talking about Obama-care being a government takeover of the health care industry, and say “wait, wait, that’s a bunch of crap and you know it”?  Shouldn’t the “Journalists” who conduct the candidate “debates” (and anyone who’s ever actually been on a debate team knows that those joint appearances by the candidates are certainly not “debates”) do the same?  Shouldn’t they call them on their falsehoods, no matter which party they belong to?

Or should they leave every statement unchallenged, and let the opposing candidate call an assertion into question?

I don’t know.  I’m sure this line of questioning is being repeated in college classrooms across America, and I have no idea if the “model” is changing or not.  The media certainly have changed, and the way we consume media certainly has changed.   I think we have to ask the question, though, so that we start thinking about an answer, and perhaps a different model.

Perhaps Sorkin’s new show will cast more light on this in future episodes.

WHAT New Jobs???

Well, it’s been nearly three weeks since the election – where are the new jobs that we were promised by both Tommy Thompson and Scott Walker in the run-up to the June 5^th vote?  You remember – the new jobs that would be announced right after the election.

The “main-stream media” won’t hold you accountable for your promises, but I will.

There was a time, not too long ago, that if Tommy Thompson got up on a stage (as he did in Oshkosh in May) and said he’d talked with a number of employers in the past few days, and they’d told him that they’re not hiring now, but if Scott Walker survived the recall, they would begin hiring immediately – that some reporter would follow up with Tommy’s people and say “what companies, which employers was Tommy talking to that said they’d hire if Walker survived the recall?”

Because certainly our former Governor-turned-Tea-Party-darling would not make up such a thing, just to make a little political hay.  Would he?

Governor Walker made similar, but more elliptical pronouncements on the campaign trail as well, implying that as soon as he survived the recall, and employers could be sure that he’d stay in control, they’d begin hiring for positions they were holding open until after the political picture was made more clear.

This kind of follow-up by reporters just doesn’t happen any more.  Now, they tweet a few phrases at the news event; file a paragraph or two for their station or paper’s website; maybe post a quick video bite; then they write the story for their station or paper, which is aired on the next newscast or printed the next day, and it’s off to the next story.  There’s apparently not a level of content management any more that keeps track of this stuff and makes a note to a calendar file saying “follow up on new jobs Thompson promised in Oshkosh”.

Such content management would require the kind of staffing and experienced news personnel that no longer exists in the news media.

So, since they aren’t going to follow up, I will:  Tommy – Scotty: name TWO companies or executives that you spoke to before the election, and said they’d start hiring if Governor Walker survived the recall.  Just two.  One’s too easy.  Name two.  And know that there will be follow-up questions with those companies or executives.

It’s called “reporting”, and there used to be a fair amount of it done here and in other places.

Tea-ing it up...

I’m so confused.  Is Tommy a tea person or not?

The shot above, captured by Politico.com, shows Tommy a few months back, Tea Party flag proudly flapping in the wind behind him, whipping up the crowd in Madison.

Yet when I asked someone who’s supposed to know about these things, he told me Tommy is the antithesis of everything the Tea people stand for: big spending, big government, mass transit, yadda yadda yadda.

Last week Tommy and his pals Scotty and Becky put on a show at the Leach Amphitheater in Oshkosh, drawing a crowd (?) of nearly 200 people, and giving speeches about what they consider to be important things.  Scotty, of course, said he deserves to win the recall because he’s doing great things for Wisconsin.  Becky said pretty much the same thing.

But Tommy can’t just stand behind the lectern (although, nearly everyone in the media calls a lectern a podium – which is something you stand on, not stand behind) and give a talk.  Tommy gets out from behind the lectern and paces up and down the stage, giving his patented fire-‘em-up speech about ‘sconsin and all the good things about ‘sconsin like the Packers and the Badgers.  Man, there’s some real cutting-edge stuff: let’s cheer for the Packers and the Badgers!  Yay

Anyway, I digress, as usual.  In the most recent Oshkosh talk, Tommy let the cat out of the bag: he said he’d been talkin’ (Tommy usually drops his g’s) with a bunch of business people the past few days, and they’re tellin’ him that they’re just rarin’ to go with more hirin’, spendin’, expandin’ their inventories, and pumpin’ up the state economy, but they’re not gonna do it until after Scotty wins the recall.  Tommy didn’t say what would happen if Scotty loses, but it’s fair to assume that if that Barrett fellow wins, there’ll be no hirin’, spendin’, expandin’, or pumpin’ up.

If I were still working in the nooz biz up in the Fox Valley, I would have called Tommy’s people after the speech and said something snotty like “certainly you can provide me with the names of the business leaders Tommy has been talking to about these expansion plans that will happen after Scotty wins, because I’d hate to think that Tommy just made that stuff up….and I don’t want to go over his itinerary for the past few weeks and try to make educated guesses about who the secret job-creators are.”

I guess we’ll just be left to wonder who those mystery job-creators are, until after the 5^th of June.  And as to the question of whether Tommy is a tea person or not: I guess the answer depends on who’s askin’.

The Tale of Tommy and Tammy

One is an unabashed progressive/liberal, openly and proudly gay, a Madison hometown woman who’s been in Washington since 1999 with huge name recognition in……Dane County.  The other is a small-town boy from the tiny hamlet of Elroy, arguably the most popular Governor in the state’s history, a moderate Republican who has a track record of working with people from the other side of the aisle, likes mass transit, is an inveterate cheerleader for Wisconsin, and has huge name recognition in every county, corner, nook and cranny in the state.

Both want Herb Kohl’s seat in the United States Senate.

Even lefty former Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz likes Tommy.  In a recent column/blog for Isthmus, Cieslewicz talked about how he’d reached out to Tommy for help trying to save the federal train money. Dave says Tommy obviously worked hard to try and help, but we all know how that story ended.  And there’s no doubt Dave will cast his ballot for Tammy, not Tommy.

In this day and age, it’s more than surprising that a hard-core lefty like former Mayor Dave would reach out to a Republican politician for help in accomplishing a task; and even more remarkable that a lifelong Republican would even take such a call, say nothing about actually working with a member of the “opposition” for what they both perceived as a project for the common good.

I’ve interviewed Tammy countless times in person and on the phone; while she can come off as somewhat of a Pollyanna, and often avoids hard questions and attempts to redirect the conversation, I have no doubt that Ms. Baldwin is a true, honest, and loyal public servant of her constituency, and that she really does act most often in the best interests of the people she represents.  Tammy often had a staff person with her when she appeared on Sly’s morning radio program, but Tammy took Sly’s (and my) questions and responded without conferring with the staff person; she took live calls from listeners and gave off-the-cuff responses.  She knew her stuff and you would be hard-pressed to stump her.

I’ve interviewed Tommy countless times during his long tenure as Governor.  Here’s an in-studio photo from 1989, from the former (multi-award-winning) radio show (Madison’s Morning News) my wife (who wasn’t yet my wife then) and I did, with Governor Thompson holding forth as “Guest Editor” – a role which allowed him to make unfettered, unfiltered, and uncensored comments on anything Toni or I would say, including the privilege of actually interrupting us during a scheduled newscast to make an observation.  No staff; no handlers; no spin doctors ever accompanied Tommy during his visits to our show.  His driver, a State Patrol officer, would sit in the producer’s booth sipping coffee.  Tommy took plenty of live calls from our listeners, and he answered every question head-on, no dodging.

I’m not going to mention Mark Neumann or the Fitzgerald boy or anybody else who might be interested in Herb Kohl’s seat.  I think it’s going to be Tommy and Tammy.  And if so, Wisconsin has a very interesting choice to make about which one to put in that Senate seat.

But I’ll tell you this: either one, Tammy or Tommy, is a hell of a lot better choice than that fellow from Oshkosh who has our state’s other U.S. Senate seat.

(The side-by-side photo at the top of this post is stolen from Isthmus.)

Rusty's Out; Tommy's....In?

So, Tommy Thompson (D…ah, I mean R, Elroy) has rounded up the usual suspect (Jim Klauser) and is making serious noises about running for US Senate.  Gee, what a shock.  Tommy, talking about running for something.  And Russ Feingold says he’ll run for NOTHING in 2012.

The blogosphere is taking Tommy’s threat seriously, swearing that he really means it this time and will officially announce just after Labor Day.

Problem is….which party will have him?  Tommy is a political dinosaur now, still thinking he’s a Republican.  If ever there were a RINO (Republican In Name Only), it’s Tommy T.

Full disclosure: I like Tommy.  He was kind enough several times while Governor to be “guest editor” on the old “Madison’s Morning News” radio program my wife and I hosted during the Thompson years.  He’d sit with us the full three hours of the show, and tell stories and take phone calls (even from lots of those "Dane County Liberals"!) and generally have a good time.

Tommy represents to me – and maybe this is just my age – the “real” Wisconsin spirit.  Work together to find solutions to problems.  Argue your point vigorously; take a vote; and whether you won or lost, have a brew or two at the Avenue Bar with the pols who voted with you and those who voted against you.

Welfare’s a problem?  Don’t throw it out; don’t blame the poor; fix it.  Same with health care: expand the program, don’t cut it to death.  Brewers need a new stadium?  Tax those bastards in Milwaukee..”what a better way to do it…stick it to ‘em!!!”…and gitt’r done.  Amtrack?  Hell yes.  Put me on the board.  Love my Harley, but love my mass transit, too.   Stem cells?  Hell yes, let’s see if we can’t get a bunch more money from Warshington to throw at the UW.   And, while you’re in office, why not essentially double the size of government in Wisconsin.

See what I’m getting at?  Tommy’s actions make him, by any definition, a Democrat: raise taxes, expand welfare and health care, support and expand stem cell research, increase the size of government.

Nobody seems sure how to deal with this.  Miss Vicki yesterday afternoon referred to Tommy as an “old guard Republican”.  Didn’t call him a RINO, because we’re in uncharted waters here.  We’ve got a guy who was the most popular governor in decades, who essentially had the job for life, whose name recognition is gold from Hilbert to Howard to Hayward to Hales Corners, who finds himself a member of a party that now stands directly opposed to everything Tommy did while in office.

This oughtta be REAL interesting……