All Blog Posts from Public Eye

It’s getting to the point where you wonder if “boxers or briefs” was a better question than we gave it credit for, back in the day.

We’re 15 months away from the 2008 presidential election, and where do things stand? Aside from defending themselves from grenades lobbed from the other competitors – Mike Huckabee’s critical non-questioning of Mitt Romney was masterful on “Face the Nation” yesterday – the candidates have had to deal with the likes of Jon Stewart, Melissa Etheridge and Keith Olbermann asking occasionally probing questions.

But we’ve also had an odd summer of ObamaGirl and Hot for Hillary and part of me has no idea where all this is headed. Take just the past five days, for example.

First off, Suzanne Malveaux of CNN asked Hillary Clinton “Are You Black Enough?” Thursday at the National Association of Black Journalists conference in Las Vegas. Clinton handled it deftly, though, according to Eric Deggans’ account:

Facing a room packed with more than 1,000 journalists, Clinton chuckled a bit before launching into a generalized tribute to campaign diversity.

"I am thrilled to be running at a time when, on the stage, you can see an African-American man, a Hispanic man and a woman," she said, referring to Obama and fellow Democratic candidate Bill Richardson. "Democratic primary voters don't have to be against anyone. You can be for the person you believe will do the best job as our president."

I can see the point of Malveaux’s question, and understand that she wanted to package it in a hip way. She’s in TV and knows her soundbites backwards and forwards. But when Barack Obama starts complaining about the question – he said that reporters who ask it are looking for “an easy story to write and a lazy story to write” – it’s time to cut it out.

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Mitt Romney’s campaign has been doing its homework.

In a fascinating new approach to dealing with potential “Macaca Moments” – where a uncomplimentary snippet of a candidate is uploaded onto YouTube for millions of eyeballs to see – they have gotten ahead of a potential controversy -- and defanged it by posting the video on their own terms. According to USA Today:

Conflict "sells" at YouTube.

In just a bit over two days, a clip posted at the site by the campaign of Republican Mitt Romney has soared up the charts at the former Massachusetts governor's YouTube pages. It's gotten nearly 120,000 views so far.

Romney's folks call it "Gov. Romney interview with Jan Mickelson."

The Politico's Jonathan Martin has a grabbier title: "Mitt Unplugged."

Rather than a 10-second clip of Romney getting a little testy about questions concerning his Mormon faith and how he squares his political life with his religious views – a discussion that my Catholic brain is ill-equipped to judge, though “Under the Banner of Heaven” is now on my reading list – his campaign has posted the entire 20 minute clip of the interview, with all the context surrounding those occasional flashes of anger. By dealing with it head-on, the Romney folks have given themselves some measure of control over the clip.

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Hillary Clinton’s political baggage being recycled in two upcoming books. Mitt Romney’s romantic past with his wife investigated. Not only have the debates and the rituals of presidential campaigning bloomed early this year -- does the political calendar have global warming, too? – but so has the information warfare that makes political enemies smirk and political allies shift uncomfortably in their seats.

In this week’s edition of National Journal, political writer Carl Cannon is the most recent observer to wonder publicly where the line is between Relevant and Prurient. He writes:

[The 2008 race] is a wide-open field with some 20 announced and unannounced candidates, a group replete with enough messy divorces, troubled marriages, second (and third) marriages, estranged children, cancer survivors, head cases, and binge dieters to satisfy any soap opera …The gaggle of 2008 candidates will be acting out their various pathologies in a technological environment more suited for entertainment than for serious policy discussion. YouTube, the blogs, and an unfettered cable culture did not exist in 1988 and 1992, the years that the privacy barriers came tumbling down. They do now.

The upshot is a combustible mix that is prompting political observers to wonder whether the process will dissuade good people from even bothering with politics -- or whether that has already happened.

True, there used to be a line between “reportable” and “keep this out of the papers,” but in recent years it’s gotten rubbed out. Making things even more nebulous is the fact that each one creates a political Rorschach test. If you’re a fan of Mitt Romney, than you think that Mike Wallace was unprofessional when he asked if there had been any premarital sex before Mitt and his wife tied the knot – but if you’re an Obama fan, you may not have found it inappropriate. Likewise, Bill Richardson’s supporters aren’t fans of the Albequerque reporter who asked him if he had “a bimbo problem.”

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Last night, the lead story on ABC's "World News" was an exclusive report on how the "CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert 'black' operation to destabilize the Iranian government." You can read about it here, and watch it here. Then again, maybe you shouldn’t. According to many of the commenters at ABC News' "The Blotter" – around 1,500 at last count – running the report was "traitorous" because it revealed a secret U.S. government action.

Bloggers are all over the story as well: As Lynn Davidson at Newsbusters sarcastically put it, "[w]hy should a country go to the effort of spying on Americans when all they have to do is follow the US media?" She compares this story to one in the New York Times exposing the SWIFT banking transaction database and another in USA Today about an NSA phone call database, both of which came under criticism from those who felt that the programs should not have been made public.

Here's a typical comment attached to the ABC News story: "I can't believe you would report something like this! You should be ashamed of yourselves. Whatever happened to country first? Someone should be thrown in jail. It is irresponsible for news agencies in the time of war to put people's lives in danger!" And that's one of the nicer ones.

Presidential candidates are also getting in on the anti-ABC action. As "The Blotter" itself notes, Tom Tancredo and Mitt Romney criticized the report, with Romney saying he was "shocked to see the ABC News report regarding covert action in Iran."

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It would have been a surprise if last night's "60 Minutes" profile of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his family hadn't generated some criticism directed towards CBS News. But I must admit I did not anticipate the outrage in some quarters that greeted interviewer Mike Wallace's decision to question Romney about whether he'd had pre-marital sex. We are living in a post-Starr Report era, after all.

And yet:

"Must everything be about sex – or at least have a sexual component – these days?" asked Carol Platt Liebau at the conservative Townhall.com. "Remarkably, in the course of an interview for '60 Minutes,' Mike Wallace actually had the nerve to ask presidential candidate and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney whether he and his wife had engaged in premarital sex."

The American Daily, also conservative, called the question "so utterly rude it isn’t even funny."

Romney, of course, is a Mormon, a religion with strict rules against pre-marital sex. I can understand the objections to Wallace's question to some degree – one's sex life shouldn't automatically become fair play just because one is running for president.

At the same time, there was a journalistic justification for asking the question: Romney's answer, in theory anyway, could go to how serious of a Mormon he really is. And Romney's Mormonism is an issue for many voters.

In the interest of fairness, here's the counter-argument from Liebau: "It’s ludicrous to assert that Mormonism’s strict prohibition on premarital sex brought the question 'in bounds,' given that Romney is the first Mormon to run for President. The Catholic Church likewise frowns on premarital sex. Is anyone planning to ask the Giulianis the same question? Of course not."

(Incidentally, Romney's response to Wallace's query was this: "No, I'm sorry. We don’t get into those things. The answer is no.")

While we're on the topic of objections to the interview, let's go to Dean Barnett, another conservative, who objected to Wallace talking to Romney's sons about their decision not to enter the military. He writes:

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With Al Sharpton and Christopher Hitchens getting together to debate the existence of God, it was safe to assume we'd end up with some sort of controversy. I'm just surprised that it involved…Mitt Romney?

As you may have heard, Romney is a Mormon. Here's what Sharpton had to say on that matter: "As for the one Mormon running for office, those who really believe in God will defeat him anyway, so don’t worry, that’s a temporary situation."

Gothamist suggests that the Romney camp is trying to milk Sharpton's comments for publicity, though it would have been fairly odd if they hadn't acknowledged the jibe. The campaign responded that "[i]t is terribly disheartening and disappointing to hear Reverend Sharpton offer such appalling comments about a fellow American's faith."

Sharpton is backtracking – kinda. "What I said was that we would defeat him, meaning as a Republican," he said. "A Mormon, by definition, believes in God. They don't believe in God the way I do, but by definition, they believe in God."

The press has been trying to figure out how much play to give to Romney's religion, as it isn't easy to gauge how important the issue is to the electorate. Sharpton's comments seem to suggest that his religion is seen as a negative even among other people of faith – something that could certainly hurt Romney in the Republican primaries.

This strikes me as one of those telling little moments that the press corps is going to bring up again and again as the campaign moves forward.

In New Hampshire this week, Mitt Romney said this to a man in a National Rifle Association hat: "I purchased a gun when I was a young man. I've been a hunter pretty much all my life."

As the Associated Press points out, "all my life" amounts to twice: once when Romney was 15 years old and once last year.

The biggest knock on Romney as a viable presidential candidate – aside from the fact that he's OH-MY-GOD-A-MORMON – is that he's a bit of a panderer, as this oft-viewed YouTube clip seems to suggest. And little snafus like this are not what Romney needs if he's going to keep the press corps from pushing that notion until it hardens into conventional wisdom.

Since Mitt Romney officially announced his run for the 2008 presidential campaign, news outlets have been (repeatedly) asking how he will approach what they deem to be his biggest campaign challenge: being Mormon.

While the Romney campaign would not confirm or deny its authenticity, the Boston Globe has obtained "an exhaustive internal campaign document" that examines that question specifically.

The Globe writes of the document:

It acknowledges that some view Mormonism as weird and lists ways Romney should defend his faith, from highlighting the way he has lived his life, rather than which church he attends, to acknowledging theological differences with mainline Christian denominations while refusing to be drawn into an extensive discussion of Mormon doctrine and practices. It also suggests Romney might soon need to address the issue head-on, perhaps as John F. Kennedy did in a 1960 speech amid concerns about his relationship to the Catholic Church.

The document appears to raise the possibility of Romney delivering such an address at George H.W. Bush's presidential library outside Houston, the same city where Kennedy gave his. Enmity toward France, where Romney did his Mormon mission during college, is a recurring theme of the document. The European Union, it says at one point, wants to "drag America down to Europe's standards," adding: "That's where Hillary and Dems would take us. Hillary = France." The plan even envisions "First, not France" bumper stickers.

Asked about the document, a Romney campaign spokesman told the Globe that "if anything, it's a compilation of political conventional wisdom." Nonetheless, it's an interesting look inside some ultra specific concerns about Romney's image. Among them, writes the Globe: "His hair looks too perfect."

Eat The Press points us to the first television ad of the 2008 election: A spot for Mitt "Mormon!" Romney, which will start airing tomorrow in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Michigan and Florida. You can see the spot here – on Youtube, naturally. It looks like a pretty typical campaign ad to me, though, for what it's worth, a Romney spokesperson says the "goal was to show Governor Romney unplugged and get people as close to being on the campaign trail with him as you can get." Anyway, brace yourself: Ad season has officially begun. And it's only February. Of 2007. Wow.

By the way, here's the CBSNews.com story. “If the net effect on this is that in a couple weeks Romney’s jumped into double digits, he’s probably going to move everybody else’s time frame up,” Evan Tracey, the chief operating officer of the Campaign Media Analysis Group, told CBSNews.com. Fantastic.

It's easy for political candidates to get turned into one-dimensional characters by the journalists who cover them -- there is often an obvious angle for reporters and commentators to exploit. Hillary Clinton, as you have no doubt noticed, is a woman; Mitt Romney is a Mormon; and Barack Obama is black. All of these characteristics are, of course, notable, but the repetition of these storylines, the depth to which they are explored, can become just a little excessive.

Last week, that excess was pretty evident in the question (repeated ad nauseum by news outlets everywhere) of whether America was ready for a Mormon president.

At Journal-isms, Richard Prince is assessing the ocean of ink spilled recently in the nation's newspapers exploring the question of whether Obama is "black enough."

Writes Prince: "Journalists took with them the recently minted Barack Obama story line — 'is he black enough?' 'Will black voters support him?' — as they covered the Democratic presidential candidate's venture into South Carolina over the weekend."

Indeed, it's a story subject that's been minted for quite some time. Three weeks ago, it was smack in the middle of the New York Times' front page. Time magazine did it the day before that.

South Carolina, no doubt, will not be its final stop.