All Blog Posts from Public Eye

October is a month for arguments – Where’s the best foliage? Who’s going to win the World Series?

And, of course, the perennial: Should newspapers endorse political candidates? A couple newspapers in Iowa entered the debate in recent days.

The Sioux City Journal weighed in on the matter earlier this week, pointing out that USA Today founder Al Neuharth is strongly opposed to the idea – calling it “dictatorial” and “kingmaking” – before then defending their practice of backing candidates:

A good editorial or endorsement isn’t the end of the conversation, rather the beginning. It spurs conversation and thought among the readers of the paper, many of which will be printed in the form of a letter to the editor in the days following that editorial or endorsement. It is anything but a directive.

Then, as if on cue, the Storm Lake Times jumped into the fray on Saturday with the first Iowa newspaper endorsement of a candidate, the not-quite-cryptically entitled “Biden For President."

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Sure, we all get a bit overwhelmed when it comes to keeping track of just who’s running for president. Just as soon as Tommy Thompson leaves the race, Fred Thompson jumps in.

But in MSNBC's promotional website image for tonight’s New Hampshire debate among the Democratic presidential candidates, Delaware Senator Joe Biden is not featured in a collage of all the participants. (And no, the photo is not limited to three frontrunners – Gravel, Kucinich, Dodd and Richardson are all in the collage.)

A phone call to Biden’s national press secretary Mark Paustenbach confirmed the senator will be taking part in tonight’s event, even with the campaign’s reported focus on Iowa. (A voicemail left at MSNBC's press office has yet to be returned.)

I know for a fact that Joe Scarborough had a great chat with Biden two weeks ago on "Morning Joe" -- I was there, man -- and that the graphics MSNBC is using on-air include Biden, but still ... it's an omission worth noting.

So, uh: Does anyone else have debate fatigue?

We sure have had a lot of these things so far. And they're early. For a little context, consider this: Bill Clinton didn't even formally enter the race for President until October of 1991; Republican Fred Thompson, expected to be a serious contender for the nomination next year, still isn't in.

And yet we seem to have a new debate just about every week, if not more frequently – this week has brought us two, with the Logo debate about gay and lesbian issues and the AFL-CIO debate on MSNBC, both featuring Democrats. Master of understatement Newt Gingrich, complaining that the campaign season is now much too long, recently said the debates have become “almost unendurable” -- "a cross between ‘The Bachelor,’ ‘American Idol’ and ‘Who’s Smarter than a Fifth-Grader.’”

Is there a better way to do this? The ratings for the debates have been relatively high this time around, but the key word there is "relatively" – even the much-hyped YouTube debate, certainly the most publicized debate thus far, only attracted 2,622,000 viewers, and Tuesday's debate attracted less than a million. There are legitimate concerns emerging that we may be getting too an overkill point: As Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, told the Times: “Most of us worry that doing all this so early on will wear out the electorate."

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It’s a common complaint from frustrated media consumers: Why don’t journalists just point out the truth? When a politician says something fishy, why don’t they call them on it? The facts are easy enough to track down, after all. So why won’t Mr. Talking Head just use ‘em?

Perhaps because the “facts” aren’t always as straightforward as we’d like to think. Consider John Neffinger’s criticism of MSNBC’s David Shuster and his fact checking of last night’s debate. One of Neffinger’s examples: After Hillary Clinton said she would "put somebody in charge who actually cared about the people of New Orleans" – making a clear implication about the present administration – Shuster said that "To say that the Bush administration doesn't care about New Orleans - that's a leap."

Neffinger also notes that Shuster went after Joe Biden for taking about “how much [Bush] has ruined” the country. Shuster cited the dictionary definition of "ruin" as causing "irreparable damage" and said Biden’s comments were "a bit of a stretch."

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By now we all know about Joe Biden's "oops" moment. But what if it wasn't an oops at all? The New Republic's "The Plank" points out that National Review's Bill Kristol suggested on "Special Report with Brit Hume" that Biden's "clean" comment was actually a shrewd move. Really. Here's the quote:

I think it's a very clever move by Senator Biden. . . . if he had just announced his candidacy, he'd be like the ninth Democrat in the race, who would care? He'd be on page A-7 in the papers, we would not be discussing him here…

That's true, I guess, as far as it goes. But still: All publicity ain't good publicity, is it? Is Michael Richards, for example, really all that better off these days?

Joe Biden has had better days.

The Delaware Democrat and presidential candidate said this to New York Observer reporter Jason Horowitz: “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

"Articulate?" "Bright?" "Clean?" Ouch. Cable news, a number of blogs, and the Drudge Report have all jumped on the comments, and Biden is already explaining himself. It'll be interesting to see where this goes from here: Will Biden see his presidential hopes derailed by a press corps unwilling to look past the perceived racism of the comments? Or will he be able to explain them away as an inarticulate moment and leave the taint of racism behind him?

Former Senator George Allen, of course, couldn't get past the implication that he was a racist, thanks in large part to his ill-advised "macaca" comment – he referred to a 20-year-old of Indian descent by the slur at a campaign event. Allen, you might remember, had a "race problem" even before the gaffe, something that certainly didn't make it any easier for him to play the macaca comment down as an isolated incident. Unfortunately for Biden, he has race problem of his own – he said "You CANNOT go into a 7-11 or a Dunkin Donuts without an Indian accent," a comment that some complained was offensive.

Is Biden a racist? I have no idea. What is becoming increasingly clear, however, is that he is prone to comments that get him in trouble – and in a media environment in which every gaffe can be endlessly replayed, discussed and analyzed right up to Election Day, that's not going to make his path to the White House any easier.

UPDATE, 6:10 PM: The following statement from Biden just landed in my inbox: "I deeply regret any offense my remark in the New York Observer might have caused anyone. That was not my intent and I expressed that to Senator Obama.”

UPDATE, 10:20 AM: How could I have forgotten this?

It’s not every day that we see a Democratic Senator from the Northeast pandering to Southern Republicans by associating himself sympathetically with the Confederate cause during the Civil War – so isn’t it newsworthy when that actually happens? Senator Joe Biden of Delaware has made no secret of his desire to test the presidential waters for the Democratic nomination. As part of that quest, he showed up in South Carolina, an important early primary state, where he took the unusual step of speaking to a mostly Republican audience at the Columbia Rotary Club. According to The State’s preeminent political reporter, Lee Bandy, here’s part of what Biden said to his strange-bedfellow audience:

“I want to thank you all for allowing me a trip here to speak to only Republicans. It’s like my hometown. I just won every district in my state except the one I live in,” he quipped.

The crowd howled.

The senator then pounced on a member’s announcement that the club would hold its annual Christmas party at the state Department of Archives and History where members could view the original copy of the state’s Articles of Secession.

Biden asked, “Where else could I go to a Rotary Club where (for a) Christmas party the highlight is looking at the Articles?”

Biden was on a roll.

Delaware, he noted, was a “slave state that fought beside the North. That’s only because we couldn’t figure out how to get to the South. There were a couple of states in the way.”

In all fairness, as Bandy points out, Biden’s remarks were clearly made in jest as he warmed the crowd up with a laugh or two before moving into his speech on the Iraq war. But it’s not the first time Biden has made similar comments. Appearing on “Fox News Sunday” in August, Biden made the case for his candidacy in the South, according to an AP account at the time, saying, “"You don't know my state. … My state was a slave state. My state is a border state. My state has the eighth-largest black population in the country. My state is anything from a Northeast liberal state."

Then again, Republican Senator Trent Lott said he was only joking in 2002 in comments he made at the 100th birthday party for his colleague Strom Thurmond. Lott noted that his home state of Mississippi had voted for Thurmond when he ran for president on a segregationist ticket in 1948. Lott then added, “And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either."

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