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Archive for February, 2008

It’s 3 A.M. Do You Know Where Your Rhetoric Came From?

Published by William Beutler on February 29, 2008 in Advertising, Barack Obama, Democrats, Hillary Clinton, Rhetoric, Television, The Politico, White House '08 and William Beutler. 4 Comments

This morning First Read covered Hillary Clinton’s last-ditch negative campaign spot, questioning Barack Obama’s readiness for the job of commander-in-chief. Here’s their write-up:

*** Goin’ negative: We were about to write this morning about our surprise that Clinton hasn’t run a negative ad against Obama in either Ohio or Texas. But then we saw the new Clinton ad in Texas that appeared on TODAY. It goes: “It’s 3am and your children are safe and asleep. But there’s a phone in the White House and it’s ringing. Something’s happening in the world. Your vote will decide who answers that call. Whether it’s someone who already knows the world’s leaders…knows the military…someone tested and ready to lead in a dangerous world. It’s 3am and your children are safe and asleep. Who do you want answering the phone?” Does it remind anyone of that LBJ Daisy ad? Ok, that’s a little extreme… But it sure does raise the specter of fear.

It’s also being compared to the “red phone” ad Mondale put up against the insurgent Gary Hart in 1984.

But it actually reminded me of something else entirely, and much more recent: a campaign mailer put out by AFSCME in support of Clinton in New Hampshire not two months ago. Politico’s Ben Smith was the first to post it; here it is, cropped for clarity/focus:

Hillary Clinton “warhead” mailer by AFSCME

You could say AFSCME tested the message in a small market before the campaign took it wider. Nothing wrong with that unless it was actually an AFSCME-backed 527, which the campaign would be forbidden from coordinating with. Then again, lifting an argument two months later is hardly a smoking gun.

As to its potency, the AFSCME mailer received a bit of negative coverage in the blogsosphere, but not enough to backfire. This time the stakes are even higher, and the campaign itself is making the risky argument.

If it works, it will no doubt join the ranks of those controversial-but-effective spots (add Reagan’s “Bear in the woods” and 43’s “Wolves” ads in there, too). If it doesn’t, as I expect, it will be quickly forgotten and everyone can get on with blaming Mark Penn for everything.

More Obama-Related Plagiarism?

Published by William Beutler on February 20, 2008 in Barack Obama, Cable News, MSNBC, Rhetoric and Seriously. 2 Comments

I can’t keep up with all the plagiarism-related allegations against the Obama campaign, but I did notice the headline on this story by John Dickerson, currently on the front page of Slate…

Slate Plagiarizes NBC?

…bears unmistakable similarities to this recent clip by NBC’s Andrea Mitchell…

Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC

…from a week ago Tuesday night. Which leads me to ask… well, nothing really. However, when it comes to the charges against Barack Obama, I am inclined to agree with James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal. As he wrote yesterday,

isn’t it a bit heavy-handed to accuse Obama of plagiarism? This is a serious charge in academia and journalism, professions in which words are the final product. By contrast, language is a mere instrument for politicians. They hire speechwriters to put words in their mouths, something that would also be frowned upon in academia and journalism. Are voters really going to be dissuaded from backing Obama because as a politician he failed to adhere to the ethical standards that would have applied if he were a professor or a reporter? Not likely.

P.S. It’s fair to note, it isn’t Dickerson I am elbowing here — it’s Slate headline writers, who are notorious more for being misleading than for being copycats.

P.P.S. For what it’s worth, I see Crooks and Liars commenter lokmon beat me to the punch.

Click No Evil

Published by William Beutler on February 19, 2008 in Google, SEO, Tech Blogosphere and Tough Crowd. 1 Comment

Don’t be evil.

I’m sure that on more than one occasion over the past decade, Larry Page and Sergey Brin have wished they’d never committed their company to such a nebulous goal. After all, who gets to decide what’s “evil”? Sure, Google has an extensive corporate conduct policy which aims to do just that. But the real problem is, you’ve just invited everyone to start looking for ways in which you might be, in their eyes, “evil.”

Page and Brin probably never imagined that Harper’s Magazine — once influential on policy and culture but now self-marginalized on the far left — would one day deem them evil for leaving their computers on all night. But maybe they should have, because a new feature in the magazine’s latest edition does pretty much that.

The tech blogosphere paid this article some attention over the holiday weekend, but none of those tracked by Techmeme bothered to scrutinize the article. But Ian Spencer, a friend and fellow former editor of the Oregon Commentator, has.

What follows is a letter he sent to Harper’s. As we figure it will never grace the pages of Harper’s letters page — let alone Google’s search results — he has allowed me to print here:

In light of Ginger Strand’s “Keyword: Evil” article in March 2008 I find it interesting that harpers.org contains code directing a user’s web browser to communicate with Google’s servers every time they visit a page on your site. This service is called Google Analytics, and it enables Harper’s management to easily view site traffic patterns. The supposed costs of “the cloud” must carry less weight than the benefits of website visitor statistics, at least for Harper’s. And if Ms. Strand and Harper’s would like to reduce Google’s electricity usage, they could always tell Google (and other search spiders) to not index their web pages.

There were also a few inaccurate and deceptive statements in the piece. For example, Google’s servers use standard techniques like caching and indexing to reduce the overhead of a single query to just a few megabytes worth of data, not “petabytes” as claimed by Ms. Strand. And the ominous-sounding “tens of billions of CPU cycles” used to process said data is by no means excessive. After all, a computer processor faster than one gigahertz goes through more than ten billion cycles every ten seconds. If you’ve read “Keyword: Evil” on harpers.org you’ve probably used more electricity than Google’s server does when you search for “journalistic integrity.”

But I expect inaccuracies when reading about computers in a non-technical magazine. Far more troubling is the notion that Google is evil simply because they use a lot of electricity. There are plenty of important issues to criticize them on: they have horrible privacy policies and censor users in China, for example. But attacking them for providing an energy-consuming service which Harper’s itself uses was, well, unexpected.

I would just like to add: “Keyword: Evil”? Really? No wonder Harper’s is so antagonistic toward today’s Internet — they’re still on AOL dial-up.

Feud for Thought

Published by William Beutler on February 13, 2008 in Barack Obama, Blog Fights, Hillary Clinton, Internecine Battles, Netroots, New York Times and White House '08. 1 Comment

On Monday evening, Big Head DC pointed to a blog post by ardent Hillary Clinton supporter Taylor Marsh, accusing left-liberal Talking Points Memo of carrying out a

Classic hit job

against the New York Senator. Over the last 24 hours, I’ve seen a few more examples of this Clinton-Obama feud playing out across the leftosphere. For exampe, here’s Big Tent Democrat (aka Armando of Daily Kos) on TalkLeft:

Josh Marshall seems incapable of taking Hillary Clinton’s words at their face value. It seems clear that TPM is intent on ignoring the important part of this story, the pattern of sexism at NBC. This remains a very disappointing episode for TPM, both as a question of journalism and simple decency.

But Marshall isn’t the only progressive blogging entrepreneur taking friendly fire; here’s former Edwards staffer Melissa McEwan at Shakesville:

Dear Arianna, I know you hate Hillary Clinton and everything, but do you—mother to two daughters—really believe that the best way to undermine her candidacy is by giving Stephen “Mickey’s Brother” Kaus space on your pages to unleash a misogynistic tirade against Hillary, that manages to simultaneously dismiss the concerns of women everywhere who have raised red flags over the sexist treatment of Hillary by the media?

And then there is the extreme difference of opinion over Paul Krugman’s latest anti-Obama jeremiad, wherein he accuses the Obama campaign of being like “Nixonland,” after a 1956 Adlai Stevenson quote. Ironic, considering not just the Clinton campaign’s duplicity (say, campaigning in Florida) but also the existence of the term Hillaryland.

From Tennessee Guerrilla Women, Kevin Hayden and Susie Madrak agreeing with Krugman to Hilzoy, State of the Day and Ron Chusid pretty much going WTF, the left is split along Obama-Clinton lines, and they are split almost evenly.

But are they split so badly they cannot put their differences aside once the nomination has been decided? I doubt it. Their ire is not directed at the other candidate as it is directed at the other candidate’s supporters. Rifts may persist among the bloggers themselves, but it’s difficult to see how that translates into weaker support for the eventual Democratic nominee.

527 Reasons John McCain Should Watch Out

Published by William Beutler on February 13, 2008 in 527s, Advertising, Campaigns, Democrats, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Republicans and Television. 0 Comments

By process, Republicans have eliminated the probability (if not possibility) that anyone but John McCain will be the party’s nominee. Meanwhile, the Democratic contest now appears certain to last several more weeks at least. As little as two months ago, the prognosticators had the Democrats deciding early with the GOP going to a brokered convention, yet the opposite is occurring.

The conventional wisdom right now seems to be that that this is going to hurt Democrats and help Republicans. McCain now has time to win over disaffected conservatives, raise money for the general election and hone his positive message. Meanwhile, the Democrats may not know who their nominee is for sure until a month hence, and whomever emerges victorious will not only have these disadvantages against McCain but may also have to deal with more-serious-than-usual intra-party divisions. That is, a long hard slog between Cinton and Obama could leave the losing faction demoralized and slow to rejoin the fray.

I’m not sure this is correct, at least not overall. Sure, McCain will be better prepared and the Democrat will have to mend fences late. But we’re only talking about the campaigns and party apparatii. This is the age of the 527. And it cannot go without noting that this is true in no small part to McCain’s own campaign finance legislation which, by limiting soft money to the parties, weakened those institutions and, by leaving open a “loophole,” allowed issue-advocacy 527s to replace them.

Certainly, a pro-McCain 527 could launch anytime now, and I assume at least one will. But 527s are less effective at building up than tearing down. Whereas a party must build a governing coalition to succeed, 527s are often driven by a narrow faction or collection of issues. Because coordinating between a campaign and 527 is illegel, they can’t share strategy or resources, and likely won’t know the others’ targets. It’s almost designed to waste resources.

But a negatively-focused 527 doesn’t necessarily need to know whether Obama will be nominated in order to start hitting McCain. So far, we’ve been told that McCain will keep the U.S. in Iraq for 100 years, will start more wars in the meantime, and that he is very old. We will undoubtedly hear more soon. And once the key themes are worked out online, we’ll start seeing them on television.

Meanwhile, Republican 527s can’t be sure that targeting one candidate or the other won’t be money or resources wasted. The RNC just rolled out an Obama Spend-o-Meter, which does in fact play to a McCain strength, especially as the GOP itself has lost credibility on the matter. On the other hand, talking about big-spending Democrats is a pat response. It could just as easily have been the Clinton Spend-o-Meter.

Unfortunatley for McCain and the GOP, a candidate-specific strategy will just have to wait.

There are Two Things Wrong With this Picture

Published by William Beutler on February 11, 2008 in Barack Obama, Blog Consultants, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney and Republicans. 0 Comments

F7 with Huckabee and Romney and Obama

If the question doesn’t make sense, then read this:

At Rightroots, we have built a way for Republicans to rally behind their new nominee right out of the gate. We’re asking all Republicans to donate online to the new nominee next Thursday, February 7th. …

On February 7th, we’ll set up a page on Rightroots for you to give to the nominee and show you our community’s results in real time. …

If the nominee is McCain, we still have to do this. His campaign especially is running on fumes financially, but they’ve shown they can be effective with an even a small amount of money.

You can’t read the fine print on the screen shot above (well, you could if you squinted) but here’s what’s relevant:

The Super Tuesday primaries are over and February 7th is here. On Tuesday, Senator John McCain established himself as the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, with Governor Mitt Romney and Governor Mike Huckabee winning primaries and caucuses throughout the nation.

Please give generously to the major Republican candidates who remain active contenders for the nomination…

It’s fair to point out that Romney did not officially suspend his campaign until a few hours after the page went live, but it’s also fair to point out that by February 6, McCain was the only realistic nominee. Also fair, Romney was still there as of the last revision of this post. My own initial coverage of the February 7 effort was quite favorable, so I would be derelict if I failed to follow up and say that anyone who bought into the initial pitch — let alone gave money — should feel misled.

CPAC: I Exit the Room, Romney Exits the Race

Published by William Beutler on February 7, 2008 in CPAC, Metapost, Mitt Romney, Republicans, Tech Blogosphere and Twitter. 0 Comments

I’ve lived in Washington for a good half-decade now, but today is the first time I’ve attended the event that everyone who asks “Where’s the conservative Yearly Kos?” should remind themselves of, CPAC. Luckily for me, this year New Media Strategies secured three-day passes to the event, and even luckier, this year it’s just across the bridge (in Woodley Park) from me (in Adams Morgan). But this is about where my luck ends.

I hopped a cab with the author of CQ’s Ground Game and made it to the Omni Shoreham a little after 10:30. In the Senate Room, I picked up my designer neckwear designating me as a “CO-SPONSOR,” then started looking for the Regency Ballroom in hopes of seeing Vice President Cheney’s 11:00 a.m. speech. I wandered around the labyrinthine Omni Shoreham for fifteen minutes before finally finding a short line leading up to the ballroom. The inertia of said queue informed me that I wasn’t getting in, while the avalanche of Romney signs, placards, stickers, thunder sticks and foam “mitts” informed me that I would see Mitt Romney speak.

That was fine; I was at CPAC to schmooze and even get a little work done between speeches. So I located an aisle seat, ejected my trusty MacBook Pro out of my backpack and sat down to get some typing done. I wasn’t able to get online, however. The free wifi at the Omni wasn’t taking, and AT&T’s EDGE network wasn’t available in the basement. Little did I know, @briandevine, my colleague referenced in the last post, was sending me this Twitterdirect message:

bloggers are saying you have a really good chance of watching Romney drop out at this speech

Alas, I didn’t see it until earlier this evening. And at 1:00 p.m., as Romney’s seemingly generic speech continued, I glanced at my pass schedule to see Mark Steyn was to speak in the Ambassador Ballroom starting now. So I folded up and made for the door in a hurry. At two checkpoints I was told, like the freshmen in Dazed and Confused:

If you leave, you can’t come back.

My response was more polite but no more apprehensive. And after a few more minutes of peripatetic perlplexedness, I realized the Ambassador Ballroom was in fact directly across the hall from the Regency Ballroom, and was the room where I’d spied an overflow crowd watching Romney projected on a large screen.

As soon as I went back upstairs to figure out where to go next, the tweets started flowing. I think the first was from Dave Winer, RSS inventor and not exactly a political blogger:

Romney is withdrawing. Giving speech at conservative group in Washington.

Damn.

Later, I rationalized my foolhardy decision to bolt the ballroom: If I’d seen Romney drop out of the race, I would have witnessed history, of a kind. I was never a supporter — obviously, or I would have remained. Meanwhile, I am a big fan of Steyn’s — his monthly obit feature in The Atlantic was my favorite part of that magazine while it ran.

Skipping out early, on the other hand, gave me a story to tell, and now I’ve told it.

Return of the Smoke-Filled Back Room

Published by William Beutler on February 7, 2008 in Democrats, Elections, New Media Strategies, Republicans and Seriously. 1 Comment

My colleague Brian Devine, a good Democrat even though he once sported a Fred Thompson sticker on his car (next to one for Mark Warner), is not enthusiastic about where the fight for his party’s nomination is headed:

The point of all this is that since the primary is so close, one of these two groups composed of the Democratic leadership — the superdelegates or the credentials committee — will be the body that decides who will become the Democratic Party’s 2008 presidential nominee. And not the voters. Prior to today, I believed that the largest flaw in our electoral system was the leapfrogging of states for earlier primary dates. But now it is clear that I was wrong. The Democratic Party can’t get much more undemocratic than not letting the people decide.

There’s more to it than that, and if you’re unfamiliar with the situation he quotes enough to give you the full background.

Meantime, I’m left more than a little amused that the Republican Party nomination process — which features no superdelegates and dealt with its state parties’ “earliest” one-upsmanship in a less extreme manner — is actually more democratic than that of the Democratic Party.