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Dispatches from the surreal calamity of last night’s Democratic leadership debate
Posted on April 17, 2008 by Douglas Bell
Last night, in a massive Philadelphia museum devoted to the American Constitution, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama hammered away at each other—gladiators in the great Democratic political contest. The debate itself, part of the run-up to the Pennsylvania primary on April 22, took place in a smallish TV theatre and was moderated by ABC correspondents Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos. Outside that small room, though, in a massive cathedral of spin, looking out 30-foot-high windows at Independence Hall, a thousand journos banged away at laptops, murmured into microphones and adjusted their ties and blouses before the camera. This horde represented an array of newspapers, Web sites, blogs, and radio and TV stations bearing a Dadaesque constellation of acronyms from throughout the world—ABC, NBC, CBS, WLS, WLAY, WABC, WDKA, WSYR, BBC, CNN, C-SPAN—most of which were repeated out along 6th Street, where satellite trucks stretched into the distance like a futuristic trailer park and news helicopters floated above. It was American madness pure and thick, and I wandered through it, as Leonard Cohen would say, like a lost Canadian.
Throughout the event, America’s journalistic elites sauntered about consuming free food and drink in a kind of free-floating, if slightly tedious, dinner party. The New York Times’ lead political columnist, Maureen Dowd, with her leopard-print skirt and tinted red hair, held court as other journalists drifted by either to pay homage or—if sufficiently big foot themselves—to display studied indifference. Newsweek columnists Howard Fineman and Jonathan Alter swanned by. The Washington Post’s Dan Balz and CNN’s Candy Crowley kept their noses in their laptops doing passable imitations of working stiffs. Outside, on a giant concrete plaza, ABC (who sponsored the event) broadcast its supper-hour national news show live. In a warm-up for the debate, the aforementioned Stephanopoulos and Gibson—coiffed, powdered, loafered—chatted like two guys passing the time, their oversized TV expressions looking alarmingly frantic to the naked eye.
Following the two-hour fracas, the press decamped to the so-called “spin room,” which was marked with signs reading “SPIN ROOM.” Once there, the journos moved like overfed cattle between various spinners, who, in turn, explained to the multitudes how to think about what just happened. Each spinner was accompanied by a handler holding a long placard reading either “Obama” or “Clinton.” I assumed that the attendees—being both American and professional journalists—knew the identity of the individual spinners. So imagine my shock when a chase producer for NBC News turned to me and asked rhetorically, “Do you know what the most oft asked question is at these events?… ‘Who the fuck was that?’”
Despite my delirium, I managed to recognize a few of the spinmasters. I asked former Bill Clinton aide Mandy Grunwald whether this campaign reminded her at all of ’92 and she professed to not understand the question. General Wesley Clark stood next to young congressman Patrick Murphy and David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist. Each of them twisted this way and that to feed the braying mob. Axelrod was far and away the most impressive—a sly Chicago wise guy, funny, charming and forever knowing—pouring streamlined sound bites into the multitude of lenses and microphones (“One good thing about running against Hillary Clinton. Nobody will say that you can’t handle a negative campaign”).
As for the debate, the “presumptive nominee” Obama lost to the “underdog” Clinton—but I won’t bore you with all that. The questions were mostly pointless and fell like drunks at a party, the candidates observing but skilfully avoiding them. At one point, ABC ran a clip of a dowdy rural Pennsylvania housewife asking Obama why he didn’t wear a flag pin on his lapel, which, in political terms, is like being asked “When did you stop beating your wife?”
No, the real story here was the media itself—the surging masses, the professional hierarchies, the “SPIN ROOM” label so readily acknowledging the very thing that the press is meant to reveal, clarify and overcome. At one point, tucked away in a display case in a small alcove, I found an original copy of the Pennsylvania Packet—the first newspaper to publicize the constitution on September 19, 1787, two days after the Constitutional Convention had given it a thumbs-up. And just around the corner, the fruits of that labour: the massive engine of communication and interpretation that now dwarfs the very political process it is meant to report.
Who is going to report that story?
• Worst. Debate. Ever. [The Guardian]
• Live-Blogging the Democratic Debate [New York Times]
• ‘Yes, yes, yes’ Obama can win, Clinton says [The Globe and Mail]
• Clinton admits Obama could win White House [CBC]
• The Note: Kitchen’s Sink [ABC]
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Lit_200 April 18, 2008 at 9:05 a.m.
I don't know how to respond to this one. Doug has said it all, along with the guardian, the times and mop and pail, CBC and ABC
So here's something similarly wacky and fun from the other side of the world. Prepare yourself for this one with a Stoli martini or two.
There's a Finnish rock band called The Leningrad Cowboys. A little while ago, they held a concert in Russia, in which they got the Red Army Choir to join them on stage for a performance of "Sweet Home Alabama." In English. As Doug Bell might say, you couldn't make this up.
We're talking seriously off the wall here. Better have that Stoli ready:
http://www.tothepointnews.com/index.php?...
Barbara_in_BC April 18, 2008 at 12:05 p.m.
Perhaps the American media is not "liberal" after all? Looks like they deliberately screwed up the Democratic debate.
How ABC News advertised the upcoming Democratic debate:
"Find out how they tackle tough questions on the campaign issues that you care about-- from Iraq to healthcare, from immigration to education. Join us for the first Democratic Presidential Debate of the 2008 cycle and the first Democratic Presidential Forum of the 2008 cycle held in Iowa."
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=...
How it turned out:
"ABC debate was trivial pursuit"
By WILL BUNCH
Philadelphia Daily News
A few minutes after the Democratic debate in Philadelphia ended Wednesday night, I channeled my outrage toward ABC News into to an open letter on my Attytood blog. Here's an abridged version:
Dear Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos,
With your performance tonight - your focus on matters that were at best trivial wastes of valuable airtime and at worst restatements of right-wing falsehoods, punctuated by inane "issue" questions that in no way resembled the real-world concerns of American voters - you disgraced my profession of journalism, and, by association, me and a lot of hard-working colleagues who do still try to ferret out the truth, rather than worry about who can give us the best deal on our capital gains taxes.
But it's even worse than that. By so badly botching arguably the most critical debate of such an important election, in a time of both war and economic misery, you disgraced the American voters, and in fact even disgraced democracy itself.
You implied throughout the broadcast that you wanted to reflect the concerns of voters in Pennsylvania. Yet you asked virtually nothing that reflected our everyday issues - trying to fill our gas tanks and save for college at the same time, our crumbling bridges and inadequate mass transit, or the root causes of crime here in Philadelphia.
Instead, the segment asking Obama whether he thought his pastor "loved America as much as you do" and then suggesting that Obama himself is somehow a hater of the American flag, or worse, was flat-out repulsive.
Charlie, I'm going to sign off this letter the way that you always sign off the news, that "I hope you had a great day."
Because America just had a horrible night. *
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/200804...
Barbara_in_BC April 18, 2008 at 1:06 p.m.
But Stephen Colbert is on the case. Here's his challenge to the "fake news" media:
Colbert Report: Senator Obama Puts Manufactured Political Distractions “On Notice”
Senator Barack Obama joined Stephen Thursday night with a message for the media: Stop with the petty, manufactured sideshows and start covering the issues that actually matter.
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/04/18...
GravityLevity2 April 19, 2008 at 12:03 a.m.
"Perhaps the American media is not "liberal" after all? Looks like they deliberately screwed up the Democratic debate."
Tha mainstream American media have always seemed quite right-wing, pro-Republican to me (since the 1950s at least), less "liberal" even by a few tones than majority American public opinion. But then, what seems conservative to me, a Canadian, might seem "liberal" in the US.
Barbara_in_BC April 19, 2008 at 4:18 p.m.
Here's one of the reasons the Democratic debate was a debacle:
The moderator, George Stephanopoulos, is a former Clinton administration bigshot who aimed his guns at Obama! But the whole Democratic party suffered from this horrible debate and right wing shill Sean Hannity is the one who takes the "credit".
"Sean Hannity Boasts About Punking George Stephanopoulos"
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/04/19...
Hannity: "The liberal blogs are losing their minds today in part because I suggested the question to George Stephanopoulos Tues afternoon on my radio show."
Crooks and Liars site says:
While we’ve had plenty of criticism for MSNBC’s and CNN’s debate coverage this season, nothing they did came anywhere near to what ABC pulled last Wednesday and Stephanopoulos’ on-air dumpster diving for gotcha questions on Hannity’s radio show will likely go down as one of the dumbest moves by a debate moderator ever. We’ve come to expect smear jobs like this from the likes of Hannity, and the Dems have rightly refused to attend any debate on the GOP/Fox News Channel because of it, but now we have ABC News’s Chief Washington Correspondent and former Democratic presidential political adviser openly seeking their advice and unapologetically emulating them.
Lit_200 April 21, 2008 at 11:02 a.m.
BBC would lob only softballs?
Barbara_in_BC April 22, 2008 at 12:58 p.m.
I would lob only questions about how each candidate would deal with the REAL problems America has, not test their patriotism in the juvenile way that was done. Like ABC advertised they would do....
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