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Why Democrats Should Primary Biden

In the middle of the last century, prizefighters who weren’t fighting frequently enough to keep sharp would schedule tuneup matches with capable boxers to shake the ring rust out of their form. Their managers wouldn’t pick palookas or chumps but boxers who could challenge their guy in a way that would reveal his weaknesses and indicate what part of his game needed more training.

President Joe Biden needs a tuneup. He’s a stiff when speaking at the lectern. When not a stiff, the 80-year-old can be a dolt, saying, as he did this week, that Russian President Vladimir Putin is “losing the war in Iraq” when he meant Ukraine, or blurting out a senseless, “God save the Queen, man,” at a gun control rally last week. The English language has never been his friend, so it’s logical that his managers, er, his aides, have limited his exposure to the press. No president since the equally doddering Ronald Reagan has held so few press conferences. Not since Ray Leonard’s ill-advised third comeback has a contestant seemed so out of condition for a big rumble.

Biden has challengers, of course, but Marianne Williamson and Robert Kennedy Jr. aren’t the right ring partners to prepare him for what will be his last electoral contest. With a tepid approval rating that puts him near to Donald Trump at his worst, Biden needs a primary opponent who can prepare him for the 2024 general election, somebody who can make him prove that he can still run the traps and beat whichever Republican he faces. If Biden can’t vanquish a worthy Democrat in primary season, he has no business entering the general.

Who might that challenger be? Because the parties tend to think of their presidents as kings and not mere servants, rare is the politician who will go up against his party leader just for the sport of it. Dethronement of an elected incumbent president by his own party hasn’t happened since Franklin Pierce, so the daunting odds end up canceling out capable candidates. The intraparty argument against primarying the president notes how, in recent decades, such challengers have failed to win and only weaken the incumbent to the point that he loses the general (Ronald Reagan vs. Gerald Ford; Ted Kennedy vs. Jimmy Carter; Pat Buchanan vs. George H.W. Bush). Winning, after all, is everything in politics.

Biden presents a different case. Not every old person who wants to be president should be placed on an ice floe and shoved off to sea. Several octogenarians who still have the gas it takes to operate the White House come to mind. Warren Buffett. Charles Koch. Michael Bloomberg. Nancy Pelosi. Anthony Fauci. Ralph Nader. Sandy Koufax. Well, maybe not Koufax, but you get the drift. But the onus should be on Biden to prove he’s mentally and physically nimble enough to do the job for another term before he’s allowed to run against the best the Republicans have to offer. Say what you will about Trump, who just turned 77, but he seems as competent (read that however you wish) as he was in 2016. The GOP is largely lining up behind Trump, but at least a growing number of ambitious Republicans are forcing him to run a real primary campaign instead of bowing to him. Just listen to Chris Christie raking Trump: He’s a “self-consumed, self-serving mirror hog” who can’t take responsibility for his actions, someone who’s “self-obsessed” and can be likened to Voldemort.

Democrats should have such guts. Gov. Gavin Newsom of California is already acting like the president-in-exile, proposing a new gun control constitutional amendment, working to ban gas-powered cars and threatening to arrest Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for kidnapping migrants. Like Newsom, Pete Buttigieg wears his presidential ambitions on his forehead like a bumper sticker. There’s surely not a moment that he’s not thinking about being president, so why not act on those instincts, the same ones that launched him from mid-city mayor to Transportation secretary? To mix sports metaphors, Buttigieg could be Biden’s rabbit in the primary, running so hard and so fast that Biden would pick up the pace and show the doubters his own youthful stamina. Both Newsom and Buttigieg are going to run in 2028 anyway, so why not get going now? They would be doing him a favor by toughening him up.

Remember, thanks to Covid-19, a good portion of Biden’s 2020 campaign was virtual, so 2024 will be more taxing for the president. Besides putting him in fighting trim (or not), primary adversaries would prepare us for the all too real possibility that he’s incapacitated by a stroke, seriously injured in one of his frequent falls or another bike crash, or just dies one evening. It’s not impolite or unkind to plan for the sudden departure of any employee. If Kamala Harris had convinced the country that she could step into Biden’s shoes should he suddenly step out of them, the argument for a primary challenge wouldn’t be so urgent. But when was the last time somebody you trust told you Harris could easily fill those shoes, let alone sprint to the nomination if the hereafter called Biden home before November 2024?

Someone? Anyone? Even Beto O’Rourke or Amy Klobuchar or Cory Booker or Chris Murphy or Elizabeth Warren would suffice. Just any heavyweight under the age of 75 with the pugilistic skills to put the current champion through a hammering 12 rounds. Nobody is owed another term just because they’re completing their first. You should have to fight for the right to lead your party. And your country.

******

Everything I know about boxing I learned in The Sweet Science. Send your best right cross to [email protected]. No new email alert subscriptions are being honored at this time. My Blue Sky account has had a slap fight with my Twitter feed. My Mastodon, Post, and Substack Notes accounts have thrown their matches. My RSS feed fights dirty.

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The Trump Cable News Coverage Was Good, Actually

A minor sidebar to the Donald Trump arraignment on Tuesday was a chorus of raspberries from members of the press complaining about the overload of coverage by cable news.

“The Trump Show is back,” the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer wrote, criticizing “the minute-by-minute broadcasting of his private plane arriving in New York” and “blanket coverage of his speech.” The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi rang the same bell. “On a day the news media constantly described as ‘historic,’ it didn’t actually look like much,” he wrote. My former boss Susan Glasser, now at the New Yorker, went to Twitter to heave her scorn on the spectacle: “Worn out already by breathless incremental coverage of Trump today: He’s walking! He might talk, oh he didn’t talk! He’s in a motorcade, it’s x cars long! Seriously???” New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo joined her: “ok, person sitting with me in the studio, tell us what’s happening in the courtroom now. OK, what about now? How about now? What is he thinking now? Where’s the judge sitting? OK, what’s happening now?” Former CNN Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter called the coverage “interminable.”

That the coverage was monotonous, tail-chasing, incremental, repetitive and droning cannot be denied. The ratio of reportable news to airtime might have broken the record at CNN, MSNBC and Fox News. Some segments made Andy Warhol’s film Empire — a single, unchanging, eight-hour view of the Empire State Building — look like a riveting drama in comparison as the reporters and commentators struggled to find something noteworthy or original to say.

But what the critics overlooked was that cable news coverage isn’t supposed to be viewed nonstop like a news version of Empire — the way most of them were watching — but sporadically. That’s especially true of dominant stories like the arraignment of a former president who happens to be a candidate for reelection. That the story was news, nobody will deny. Every newspaper in the country put the Trump arraignment on Page One above the fold and published supplementary pieces galore about the legal and political ramifications of the criminal charge, yet you don’t hear anybody talking about print overkill.

Cable news was designed from its beginning in 1980, when Ted Turner started CNN, to deliver saturation coverage of major breaking news events like elections, catastrophic weather, wars, riots, school shootings, major criminal trials, impeachments, and now, arraignments like Trump’s, as they happen. When a big story breaks, the cable networks expect — rightly — that casual viewers beyond the core audience will tune in solely to learn the latest. These viewers come in waves, wanting to partake, however distantly, in the story that’s dominating the news. They tune in until their curiosity is sated and then tune out as other viewers arrive.

Because the networks understand that their audience is cycling through, they do their best to find new ways to keep telling it and to have something to share, even if it’s a kind of rerun when new viewers join. This system isn’t perfect. Often, when there’s no new breaking news to report, the reporters and commentators “dribble,” that is, keeping the news ball moving but not taking any shots because there are no shots to take. But even dribbling can be defended if it serves incoming viewers.

Cable news producers never expected anybody to watch 12 hours straight, and practically nobody does, just like nobody read every story the New York Times published about the Trump arraignment. The last time the Pew Research Center analyzed the cable news audience, it found the average viewer tunes in for only 25 minutes a day. Even the heaviest cable news viewers last for an average of only 72 minutes on the medium.

Like most drug users, cable news viewers have learned to titrate their dose before suffering the insulin shock of boredom that overwhelmed so many members of the commentariat this week. However many viewers suffered through all the coverage, there can’t be many aside from the journalists who had to tune in for their jobs or their own perverse addiction, so keep your pity in reserve. The most popular shows on cable news rarely get more than 3.3 million viewers a night.

If you were crazy enough to watch the coverage into the night, at which point reporters had actually read the formal charges against Trump, you would have learned something the daylight hours didn’t report: That district attorney Alvin Bragg appears to have a weak case. So there’s that.

In a perfect world, nobody would ever waste time watching breaking news on TV, waiting anxiously for something important to happen. Every moment would top the last as new revelations poured in. But news has its limits, as the BBC admitted on the evening of April 18, 1930, after the news well went dry one day. The announcer didn’t dribble, he came clean. “There is no news,” he said, and cut away to piano music for 15 minutes until the next scheduled program started.

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The news is often like a meringue. It needs to be whipped into something worth consuming. Send news recipes to [email protected]. No new email alert subscriptions are being honored at this time. My Twitter feed likes pie. My Mastodon account has cut the cord. My Post account wants to be booked on Jake Tapper’s show. My RSS feed says, “Kill your TV.”

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What’s the Matter With Mike Pence?

Nobody — not Jared, not Ivanka and certainly not Melania — punched the Trump administration time clock more dutifully than former Vice President Mike Pence. Serving in a mostly ceremonial role, he would stand stiffly at Trump’s side as if paralyzed by a hefty dose of succinylcholine and listen unblinkingly as the president spoke.

He never broke character during the entire Trump presidency, presumably mopping the White House floors when asked, casting tie-breaking votes in the Senate when needed, bundling up and taking out the trash, promoting the Trump agenda overseas and chasing dust bunnies as ordered. Even after Joe Biden won the presidency and Trump lied about the election being stolen, Pence remained mute and subservient, correcting Trump neither in public nor private.

Not until January 2021, when Trump told Pence to overturn the election results, did the doughboy show some spine by saying no. But Trump didn’t take no for an answer, continuing to pressure Pence publicly to send the election back to the states — a power even some Trump advisers said Pence did not have. On Jan. 6, 2021, as we know, Capitol Hill rioters picked up on Trump’s ire for Pence, erecting a crude gallows outside the Capitol and chanting “Hang Mike Pence!“ and “Bring out Pence!” as they prowled through the building. The thugs got within 100 feet of the vice president. In a now-deleted 2:24 p.m. tweet, posted just as security found a secure location for Pence, Trump further stirred up the crowd by accusing Pence of not having “the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.”

Now, Trump’s valet wants to be president. Pence hasn’t announced his candidacy yet — that would be too assertive, too direct, too scrutable. Instead, he’s tracking the presidential campaign scent with visits to Iowa and New Hampshire, and his staff is complaining about the good press Nikki Haley’s campaign is getting. If he really covets more press, let’s give it to him.

And if he really wants to be president, let’s learn a little more about when he was one heartbeat from that office, and the ways he assisted and accommodated Trump.

Yet Pence won’t even cooperate smoothly with the special counsel seeking to investigate the effort to overturn the 2020 election; he’s forcing a judge to compel his testimony.

For the past 15 months, Pence has acted as if bound by some non-disparagement agreement from speaking his mind about the Trump presidency. In the interim, Trump has continued to blast Pence. In January 2022, he excoriated Pence for not overturning the election. In June 2022, he ripped Pence for not having “the courage to act.” In November 2022, when ABC News reporter Jon Karl asked Trump about the “Hang Mike Pence” chant, Trump defended the vitriol, saying, “It’s common sense, Jon. It’s common sense that you’re supposed to protect.” As recently as three weeks ago, Trump was still targeting Pence, telling reporters, “In many ways you can blame him for Jan. 6.”

Pence has every right to get a little hot at being painted as a traitor who might be worthy of execution and is even at fault for the events that could have killed him.

So how has he answered Trump? With the grandest turn-the-other cheek mewling you have ever heard. In June 2021, Pence called Jan. 6 a “dark day,” but didn’t elaborate beyond saying the riot was quelled. Speaking on Fox News in October 2021, Pence called continuing media coverage of Jan. 6 a way to “distract from the Biden administration’s failed agenda.” In May 2022, Pence acknowledged that Trump was “wrong” for saying he could block ratification of the election but was mute on Trump endangering him. By November 2022, he was ready to call Trump “reckless” and to say he was “angry” after the riot, but is silent about who he was angry with.

In mid-March of this year, Pence seemed ready to give Trump a dressing down, saying, “History will hold Donald Trump accountable” at the Gridiron Dinner. But a couple of weeks later, he was as docile as a sloth when CNN’s Wolf Blitzer gave Pence a free shot at Trump. Blitzer asked whether he was “comfortable” with a recording of Jan. 6 prisoners singing the National Anthem at a Trump rally. Pence agreed that the perps belonged in jail but shared no harsh words about Trump, even saying the Trump prosecution in Manhattan over a hush money payment to Stormy Daniels was an “outrage.”

For Pence, the fact that the president supported a violent crowd against his own vice president is a personal thing, not an issue that rises to the political. In a November 2022 interview with ABC News’ David Muir, Pence says Trump never apologized, but five days after the riots did express a sentiment that Pence interpreted as an apology. What a pushover.

In writing his memoir, So Help Me God, published almost two years after the riots, Pence could have dipped into his four-plus year-long dossier on Trump and given readers an honest look at the administration. But he balked. Instead, he still called Trump his “friend.” With friends like that … Pence wants you to believe that Trump is a good man, that his cause was just. Pence does, however, criticize Trump’s response to the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, he does acknowledge a degree of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, and he calls Trump’s conversation with Volodymyr Zelenskyy as something less than the “perfect” call Trump made it out to be.

But he never lifts the screen of loyalty he extended in 2016 to protect and defend Trump against all comers. “Pence surely has thoughts on Trump beyond the book’s carefully crafted, made-for-promotional-material talking points, but he won’t give them to us,” Tim Alberta writes in his insightful Atlantic review of the memoir.

Even now, months after the book’s release, Pence avoids discussing his agreements and disagreements with Trump, tossing this line to Bret Baier recently: “I have debated Donald Trump before,” he said. “Just not with the cameras on.”

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who knows from experience how associating with Trump can blur one’s ethical vision, sees through the Pence pose. Speaking on ABC News’ This Week on Sunday, he unloaded on Pence’s speak-no-evil cowardice. “I was very disappointed ... when [Pence] was asked about Trump saying that it’s OK to suspend the Constitution if you feel like an election’s being stolen, and whether that's disqualifying. And Mike said, that’s up to the American people,” Christie said. “If you’re offering yourself for high public office, you have an obligation to tell people if someone is knowingly advocating for violating their oath.”

For Pence, the political is the personal, something to be tucked away like a breakable family heirloom in a bottom drawer. Dark days seem just to happen and aren’t caused by anybody. Perhaps that’s because to trace any of the madness of that day back to its roots would require him to confess that he stood totem pole still while Trump raved on — or worse, that he was Trump’s willing co-conspirator until Jan. 6 when he actually did the right thing.

This being politics, Pence wouldn’t need to dump Trump into some fiery hole to prove that he’s his own man. Neither does he have to walk a tightrope, ever-worrying that he might say something that would offend Trump or his acolytes. There’s no escaping the fact that any 2024 Republican presidential candidacy other than Trump’s is an anti-Trump move, so if he's going to run he has to accept that he’s turned against Trump. If it’s Pence’s view that Trump is not that bad, then why not just endorse him instead of running against him?

Pence’s passivity, which ignited the day he signed on as Trump’s running mate and ran full bore until the end of Trump administration, got another boost when the pair left office. As he gathers kindling for his own presidential run, Pence remains tethered to the Trump leash politically, unable to speak his own mind, moving toward 2024 with all the groveling and purpose you might expect from a sloth.

******

 Unfair to sloths, I know. Send your animal crackers to [email protected]. No new email alert subscriptions are being honored at this time. My Twitter feed doesn’t believe in political hangings. My Mastodon account is a haunted house. My Post account couldn’t get arrested if it walked naked through the Rotunda. My RSS feed will never write a memoir. Or a novel. Or a cookbook. Or a children’s book.

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Opinion | The Ousted Reporter Was Right to Call Out Ron DeSantis’ Propaganda

Reporters have been brawling with public relations flacks since the late 1800s when railroads and other corporations established press bureaus to wrangle their relationships with the media. These face-offs can be as light and collegial as a garden party. Or, the scene can be thick with bloodied fur and detached scales, as when a mongoose and king cobra fight to the death.

Such a mongoose and cobra match played out in Florida this week. Florida state flacks emailed a press release to reporters about a diversity, equity and inclusion roundtable hosted by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis that called DEI a “scam in higher education.” Axios Tampa Bay reporter Ben Montgomery promptly replied, “This is propaganda, not a press release.” A state flack tweeted a screen-shot of Montgomery’s response, and other members of the communications staff for the all-but-certain GOP presidential candidate tweeted their shared outrage to Montgomery’s email. Then Montgomery’s boss called him, and he said she canned him.

As is usual in personnel matters like this, Axios has confirmed Montgomery no longer works there. But as Poynter’s Tom Jones reports, Axios won’t explain why. Were there extenuating circumstances behind Montgomery’s departure? If so, the reporting from Poynter, the Washington Post, the Wrap, the New York Post, Creative Loafing Tampa Bay and Fox News has failed to uncover such evidence. For all we know, Montgomery may be a menace to society and in need of home detention and 24-hour surveillance. But I think not. Until greater resolution arrives, we can proceed on the assumption that a very good reporter got bumped off 1) for doing what reporters do every day; and 2) for doing what reporters are supposed to do.

It’s easy to take Montgomery’s side in this dispute. Flacks have never been in the truth-telling business, a non-controversial observation that doesn’t need to be defended. From public relations’ earliest days, the flack’s job has been to bathe the client in the cool flattery of the north light and undermine anybody who opposes him. Call it advocacy, call it persuasion, call it spin or call it propaganda, but a flack’s primary job is to frame selected facts into a context that will make his client shine. Ask any salesman.

Most government press releases contain a dose of propaganda, a statement that doesn’t need much defending, either. Government press releases are designed to present information that will advance the agency’s political point. We depend on reporters to puncture this flackery, to do additional reporting and to give readers the full story the government spokesmen deliberately elide. This requires reporters to push back when a politician’s staff dumps a load of manure in a press release and then expects the press to choke it down like hot butter biscuits. Just set aside for a moment your politics and your personal views on DEI and DeSantis and read the press release Montgomery teed off on. Then decide for yourself whether its aim was to honestly explore an issue or to spin coverage to the benefit of a predetermined agenda.

If Montgomery’s response to the press release strikes you as histrionic, be advised that histrionics run both ways in the mongoose and cobra war. Government flacks often give reporters the bluest and darkest tongue-lashings when news stories run that displease them. Many of these tirades make Montgomery’s email response look like a curtsy in comparison. It’s only natural for source-reporter relations to sometimes grow tense if the goal is to find news. The real worry is when sources and reporters get too cozy and the tough questions stop coming. When that happens, the news turns to mush.

Now, as a matter of etiquette — and in order to maintain a working relationship that will benefit readers — it’s best for journalists to toughen their hides and refrain from overreacting when a flack distributes propaganda or material of marginal newsworthiness. The key to pushing back is not to put the flack "in his place" but to elicit valuable information for readers. “The world would be better off if more reporters responded to more politicians’ press releases with, ‘This isn’t news and don’t waste my time with this drivel,’” my former editor Garrett M. Graff tells me.

Along these same lines, can we persuade more flacks to wear body armor? Most of the PR people I’ve worked with in my career have not been as brittle and vengeful as DeSantis and his press people appear to have been in their press relations. I know of no PR person who is such a delicate flower that they turn furious if I called a communique from their office “propaganda.” Most would smile and say, “That’s my job.” How necessary was it for the Florida flacks to turn this skirmish into a battle royale that cost Montgomery his job? Of course, fueling a maelstrom may have been precisely the point: It gave DeSantis another opportunity to show off to the GOP’s press-loathing base as he prepares to jump into the 2024 presidential race.

That said, there’s no reason to inflate this skirmish into a case of martyrdom for Montgomery. Nor is there any evidence that he seeks such a benediction. “I regret being so short,” Montgomery said. “In the style of Axios, I used smart brevity and it cost me.”

Pushing back is an essential part of journalism, as Jim VandeHei, Axios co-founder, accomplished journalist, and a former big boss of mine here at POLITICO, recently wrote in Axios. VandeHei recounts the time about a decade ago when things had soured between POLITICO and Roger Ailes of Fox News. As a POLITICO executive, VandeHei attempted to quiet the waters, but nothing worked. Then in 2013, a POLITICO piece made Ailes fume and holler at VandeHei in a phone call, his response being the sort you might receive from a furious flack. VandeHei offered this retort:

“Roger, go fuck yourself.”

Ailes’ screaming continued until he hung up.

VandeHei did the right thing that day. And he wasn’t fired for doing it.

Message to flacks: Send flowers or email to [email protected]. Or have me fired for my impudence. No new email alert subscriptions are being honored at this time. My Twitter feed wears body armor. My Mastodon and Post accounts think life is a Montessori school. My RSS feed floats like a mongoose and stings like a cobra.

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Opinion | The Tucker Carlson Schtick Melts Away

It has been self-evident for a long time to almost every astute observer of Tucker Carlson — his friends, his acquaintances in the journalism profession, even some viewers of his nightly Fox News Channel program — that he doesn’t believe half of the things he says on his show. That obvious truth can now be enjoyed more widely, including by fans of his show, which happens to be the most popular single attraction in cableland, thanks to new filings released from the $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit Dominion Voting Systems has leveled against Fox.

In the filings — text messages and emails authored by Carlson (and other Foxies) — he reveals that the wildly pro-Trump stance that he and his network long cultivated has been a theatrical performance. Carlson, who has long defended and promoted Trump, as well as advised him on national security issues, has never been a genuine Trumpie, he has just played the role on TV. His support of Trump and many Trump-adjacent issues has been one of convenience, and when not a matter of convenience, a measure of his fear of Trump.

“We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights,” Carlson texted an unnamed Fox co-worker on Jan. 4, 2021. “I truly can’t wait.” When Carlson’s colleague responded, “I want nothing more,” Carlson texted back, “I hate him passionately.”

Carlson continued: “What he’s good at is destroying things. He’s the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.” Elsewhere, Carlson said of the Trump presidency, “That’s the last four years. We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on. There isn’t really an upside to Trump.”

In an earlier filing, we learn that Carlson cared more about Fox’s bottom line than he did about journalistic accuracy after Fox’s White House correspondent dispelled notions about voter fraud and Dominion. “Please get her fired,” Carlson texted to Fox hosts Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity. “Seriously ... What the fuck? I’m actually shocked... It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”

To accuse the leading attraction on cable news of being so craven is a big claim. Can we really believe that a prime-time nightly cable host would gin up a unique and false persona just to sucker viewers into watching his show? What responsible observer could make such a claim? Well, two decades ago, Tucker Carlson said exactly that. In his 2003 book, Politicians, Partisans, and Parasites: My Adventures in Cable News, written long before he joined Fox, Carlson had this to say about Bill O’Reilly, then the king of cable news.

“Like everyone in TV, he has a shtick. O’Reilly is Everyman — the faithful but slightly lapsed Catholic son of the working class who knows slick, eastern Establishment BS when he sees it. A guy who tells the truth and demands that others do the same. A man who won’t be pushed around or take maybe for an answer,” Carlson wrote, completely on target.

With a little tweaking, this assessment of O’Reilly could be cut and tapered to dress Carlson. But there’s more. Did Carlson know that he was writing his future prospectus when he continued with these insights about cable’s top host?

“O’Reilly’s success is built on the perception that he really is who he claims to be,” Carlson wrote. “If he ever gets caught out of character, it’s over. If someday he punches out a flight attendant on the Concorde for bringing him a glass of warm champagne, the whole franchise will come tumbling down. He’ll make the whatever-happened-to ... ? list quicker than you can say ‘Morton Downey, Jr.’”

Soon after the book was published, Carlson went on C-SPAN to reiterate his worship and disdain of O’Reilly. “Bill O’Reilly is really talented, he’s more talented than I am, he’s got a lot more viewers, he’s a better communicator than I am, but I think there is a deep phoniness at the center of his schtick, and again as I say the schtick is built on the perception that he is the character he plays,” Carlson said.

What Carlson wrote and said in 2003 surprised nobody, especially O’Reilly’s friends, his acquaintances in the journalism profession or even some viewers of his nightly Fox News Channel program. O’Reilly was clearly playing a character of his own invention in a multi-episode TV drama called The O’Reilly Factor. The bluster and outrage, the name calling, O’Reilly’s endless demands that his interview subjects “shut up!“ was all a performance.

Bill O’Reilly was a phony, and so now we can all see that Tucker Carlson is, too.

Having diagnosed O’Reilly’s shortcomings so long ago, how did Carlson eventually become him? As many have written before, Carlson was one of the most talented Washington-based journalists of his generation. He excelled at the Weekly Standard. At Tina Brown’s Talk magazine, he scored a KO on presidential candidate George W. Bush. He distinguished himself as a New York magazine columnist. He wrote forEsquire.

TV came calling at about the same time, and he answered. As I’ve theorized before, Carlson’s slide into the dark side that is Fox News began with his initial failures in the medium. After several years doing CNN’s Crossfire, his show got blown to bits by Jon Stewart’s October 2004 guest appearance. A few months later, the show was canceled and Carlson’s contract was not renewed. Not counting a short run at PBS with a show titled Tucker Carlson: Unfiltered, his next TV stop was MSNBC, which ran from 2005 to 2008. Carlson was genuine to his journalistic values on all of these shows, but none of them took root.

Running out of networks to work for, he finally joined Fox in 2009 and served as a sort of utility player on the network’s shows. It was there and then, I surmise, that Carlson vowed he would not fail at TV again, no matter what. In 2016, Fox returned him to prime-time and gave him his own show. It was then that Carlson began to cultivate the deep phoniness that had made O’Reilly so popular. He co-opted O’Reilly’s everyman schtick, his bluster, his truth-teller guise, and his populism, and he soared in the ratings. When Fox dumped O’Reilly in 2017 — not for breaking character, as Carlson had predicted, but following allegations of sexual harassment — Carlson became the network’s face. And, finally, a towering success.

How much of the Trump agenda did Carlson really buy and how much of it was put on? Absent additional court filings revealing his unguarded thoughts, we may never know. But what we do know now, thanks to the Dominion lawsuit, is that the extremely talented and accomplished Tucker Carlson, hoodwinked by his own ambition, became the very thing the younger and smarter Tucker Carlson scorned in 2003. A transparent phony.

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Never go on TV. You’ll only say things you don’t really believe. Tell me things you don’t believe with email to [email protected]. No new email alert subscriptions are being honored at this time. My Twitter feed is honest. My Mastodon and Post accounts will remain silent until/if Twitter folds. My RSS feed is all an act.

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Opinion | What Does DeSantis Have that Trump Doesn’t?

Even though the bumper stickers, campaign slogans and 60-second TV spots have yet to sprout, the pre-spring air already stinks of a presidential nomination skunk fight between former President Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. Trump announced his candidacy almost four months ago and, after running his campaign at walking speed he has started to trot, visiting New Hampshire and East Palestine and speaking at CPAC. Although not formally declared, DeSantis is a candidate in all but word. In a recent Trumpland sortie, he staged a fundraiser at a resort four miles from Mar-a-Lago, where he wrapped his record as Florida governor in presidential bunting for party donors.

Whatever the motivations for the DeSantis candidacy, policy can’t be at the top. Ron and Don map one-to-one on so many points — taxes, border enforcement, gun law, economic and environmental deregulation, the border, the news media, the Eastern establishment, authoritarianism and remaking the judiciary — that DeSantis sounds more like a Trump veep than an opponent. Both appeal to the new conservative-populist base of the party and both favor political stunts (DeSantis sending asylum-seekers to Martha’s Vineyard, Trump banning Muslims from entering the country). “As far as I can tell, there are no serious policy differences between Trump and DeSantis at the moment,” Matthew Continetti, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of a history of the conservative movement, told Vox in November.

Ordinarily, like attracts like in politics. But there’s also a well-established tradition of ambitious politicians who agree with one another and then pair off to duel. In many cases, a candidate will co-opt the act of the candidate he admires. Robert Kennedy became a McCarthyesque anti-war candidate in the 1968 presidential election after watching Eugene McCarthy draw first blood from Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire primary. Barry Goldwater plowed the sea in the middle 1960s for conservatives and Ronald Reagan portaged his way to victory as the Goldwater candidate a decade and a half later. And practically every position and snarl Trump has ever issued from a lectern is owed to former presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan.

The key to political ID theft is to bring something new to the mix. Kennedy brought Kennedyness, Reagan brought star power and Trump brought charisma. So what is so special about DeSantis? Is he more a louder echo than a new choice? Trump and DeSantis aren’t identical pols. DeSantis flies with the hawks in foreign policy, or did until recently; Trump practices intervention avoidance. Both oppose abortion, but DeSantis out-wings Trump on the issue with Florida’s 15-week ban that allows no exceptions for incest, rape or human trafficking. DeSantis co-exists with his former GOP congressional brethren while Trump has made many enemies on the Hill; the two quibble over trade; and they probably enjoy different fast food preferences. The biggest separation between the two comes over Covid-19 politics — Trump has been typecast as a vaccine touter because he launched the Warp Speed effort while DeSantis fashioned himself (eventually) as the leader of the shutdown resistance and increasingly a vaccine skeptic.

If their greatest divergences are now mostly stylistic, how best to tell the two apart from a distance and pick one over the other? Which is more electable? That one may not be clear either. To plunder one of Marshall McLuhan's contributions to the art of taxonomy, Trump is hot while DeSantis is cool. Trump shouts and gesticulates. He incites. He plays the game by instinct. He excels at social media mugging. He nicknames people (“Tiny D” and “Ron DisHonest” are the newest examples of his potential work) and ridicules them directly. DeSantis takes the names of his political foes but rarely speaks them. And Trump can’t help but offend, even when he attempts to walk a straight line.

DeSantis’ coolness bespeaks the frigidity of his Yale and Harvard Law educations. He climbs many of the same political stairs as Trump, but takes one deliberate step after another instead of leaping three at a time. He shuts the press out instead of confronting it directly. DeSantis rarely overshoots his political targets, while Trump often must strafe in order to score a hit. DeSantis is measured when Trump is anarchic, reserved where Trump is manic. DeSantis cultivates looking smart while Trump doesn’t mind appearing dumb if it will garner applause. He’s known for being aloof, while Trump loves the crowd.

Positioning himself as a cooler, reskinned Trump, DeSantis offers an option to voters who still want to swing with Trump but have grown weary of his 24/7 show. In making his pitch to voters, DeSantis has deliberately taken Trumpism to new frontiers that make Trump look unimaginative. DeSantis’ bans on the teaching of sexual orientation and the history of racism, his remaking of New College of Florida in the conservative image and his general opposition to “indoctrination in education,” all have Trump playing catch up.

DeSantis’ decision to pit himself against one of the state’s largest employers, the Walt Disney Company, has made him look like a strong man to voters who prefer that profile in their politicians. With a plan of attack straight out of organizer Saul Alinsky’s playbook, DeSantis made the Orlando mouseworks the object of his demagoguery after it publicly opposed his so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill. In Alinskyesque fashion, DeSantis isolated Disney, froze it, personalized the company in many of his obsessions and polarized the issues. He accused Disney of genuflecting to China and denounced it as “woke.” He worked to remove its special tax district. For sheer gall and execution, going medieval on Disney out Trumped Trump. Disney, after all, had been a loyal DeSantis campaign contributor. He’s a man! Disney is a mouse! Not since President Harry Truman nationalized the steel industry had a politician so completely taken an American business hostage.

Devoted now to repelling one another, Trump and DeSantis are doomed to engage in a bloody outrage spiral. We got a taste of that over the weekend when Trump told the CPAC crowd, “For those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.” Like a lost sermon from the Book of Revelation, Trump went off on RINOS and globalists, neocons and “freaks,” saying, “This is the final battle, they know it. I know it, you know it, and everybody knows it, this is it. Either they win or we win. And if they win, we no longer have a country.” Meanwhile, DeSantis resonated on the same frequency in his weekend speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California, ripping the “woke mind virus,” California tax policy, sexual “indoctrination,” natch, and saluted himself for having ended Disney’s “corporate kingdom.”

Do you favor Coke or New Coke? Last year’s iPhone or this year’s? Windows 7 or Windows 10? The 2024 Republican nomination has already reduced itself to a choice and its more subdued echo.

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I’m a Windows 10 sort of guy and won’t switch to 11 until they allow me to move the taskbar to the left side of the screen. Send your soda, phone and operating system preferences to [email protected]. No new email alert subscriptions are being honored at this time. My Twitter feed still runs C/PM. My Mastodon account can’t boot. My Post account runs Linux. My RSS feed is the blue screen of death.

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Opinion | Rupert Murdoch Rides the Trump Tiger — and Gets Eaten

An article of faith among modern media observers preaches that Rupert Murdoch can manipulate American politics in any direction he wants through the broadcasts of his lucrative media property, the Fox News Channel. This article of faith, which Democrats share with their children to give them nightmares and Republicans share with theirs as a cautionary tale, has given Murdoch king-maker status over the years as he has directed his channel to reward his supplicants and punish his enemies.

But on closer examination, and especially in light of the testimony released in Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation suit against Fox News for its coverage of the “stolen” presidential election of 2020, Murdoch isn’t always the master puppeteer he’s reputed to be. In Murdoch’s own words, delivered in Dominion suit depositions, he describes himself as frightened by the power Donald Trump holds over the Fox audience. He portrays himself, accurately in this case, as the supreme authority at his network but unable to control his prime-time anchors who endorsed Trump’s lie of a stolen election. And he regrets not interceding — which he says was within his power — to keep stolen-election fabulists like Rudolph Giuliani and Sidney Powell from repeatedly appearing on his shows, even though some Fox executives and anchors were gagging, off-screen, on Giuliani and Powell’s wild-eyed theories.

Far from being a media superpower, as his foes would describe him, Murdoch comes off as trapped by the craven choices he made to serve as Trump’s supplicant and protector. By 2020, Murdoch had been trying to elect a president of his own choosing for decades. He loaded the Fox payroll with presidential aspirants like Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, John Kasich and Ben Carson. Murdoch gave Trump the keys to popular shows like Fox & Friends both before his run and after he became president, allowing him to phone in and gab at his leisure. All of this squiring of Republican candidates became known as the “Fox Primary,” the implication that the road to the White House led through the Fox green room, an implication that delighted Murdoch. In 2011, Fox host Sean Hannity personalized the selection process by actually labeling his interviews with White House applicants the “Hannity Primary.”

But as I’ve written before, Murdoch has failed again and again to elect a president of his choice. In the 2016 campaign, he opposed Trump, tweeting in July 2015, a month after Trump announced, “When is Donald Trump going to stop embarrassing his friends, let alone the whole country?” Trump was so furious at Fox coverage at one point, and with then-host Megyn Kelly, that he retaliated by skipping the Fox primary debate. Moreover, Murdoch opposed Trump’s signature positions on immigrants, the Muslim ban and trade. Only after Trump paved a sure path to the nomination did Murdoch start sucking up to Trump, and he sucked hard.

The Trump-Fox feedback loop benefited both parties as Fox ran interference for Trump throughout his presidency and Trump filled Fox’s schedule with the strong meat of his persona. By July 2019, Trump had given 61 interviews to Fox channels compared to 17 for ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC/CNBC combined. The downside of grabbing a tiger by the tail, as we all know, is how to ungrab the tail as the ride slows or the tiger gets hungry. Murdoch probably thought dismounting would be an easy process once Trump lost the 2020 election and shuffled off to political oblivion.

But it wasn’t that easy. When other news networks called the election for Joe Biden before Fox, Murdoch expressed relief in an email to his son and fellow Fox executive, Lachlan. “We should and could have gone first but at least being second saves us a Trump explosion!” Fox was spared the immediate Trump explosion, but it came eventually as the network did not toe the Trump line on his election lies. He savaged the network on Twitter, writing, “@FoxNews daytime is virtually unwatchable, especially during the weekends. Watch @OANN, @newsmax, or almost anything else.” Viewers defected as instructed to the upstart news channels, which were flooding their schedules with sympathetic coverage to the stolen-election line. Now, in addition to Trump’s fury, Fox was fretting about viewer anger, and inside Fox, all was pandemonium. In testimony, Lachlan Murdoch said the drop of ratings would “keep me awake” at night.

The day before the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riot, Murdoch and Fox News Media Chief Executive Suzanne Scott plotted to have prime-time Fox hosts Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham explain Biden’s election to viewers who hadn’t gotten the message. “Privately they are all there,” Scott told Murdoch, according to the court filing, but “we need to be careful about using the shows and pissing off the viewers.” As the New York Times reports, “No statement of that kind was made on the air.”

Murdoch’s fear of a Trump temper tantrum became palpable after the Capitol Hill riot, as an email exchange between Murdoch and former Republican House Speaker and Fox Corporation board member Paul D. Ryan attests. In it, Murdoch claims that Hannity, a Trump stalwart, had been “privately disgusted by Trump for weeks, but was scared to lose viewers.” It’s obvious here that Murdoch was mapping his fear of losing viewers onto Hannity, as a single instruction to the host to tell the truth about Trump’s claims would have put things straight.

When a former Fox executive told Murdoch in a Jan. 8, 2021, email that “Fox News needs a course correction” on Trump, Murdoch replied, “Fox News very busy pivoting. … We want to make Trump a non person.” A few days later, Murdoch expanded in another email to his son. The network was “pivoting as fast as possible” away from Trump, but after four years of conditioning its audience to worship the president, Murdoch was aware that the decondition process would be hairy. “We have to lead our viewer which is not as easy as it might seem,” Murdoch wrote.

“Nobody wants Trump as an enemy,” Murdoch said in a deposition, still bruised from his tiger ride. “We all know that Trump has a big following. If he says, ‘Don’t watch Fox News, maybe some don’t.’”

The Fox “pivot” away from Trump did come eventually, all but banning him from the network, even if some of its hosts still put in a good word for him. Trump continues to hector Fox from his social media perch, recently calling it the “RINO network,” but he has yet to go full bore against his former ally. Who among us would preclude a reunion in 2024, with Trump pulling Murdoch’s strings once more if Trump wins the presidential nomination?

Murdoch’s pursuit of power and money, and his deft combination of the two, has always been a naked secret for those who care to inquire. These latest court filings only strip the top layer of epidermis from his hide and expose his venal essence. As late as Jan. 26, 2021, Murdoch was still so fearful of Trump that he had not executed the pivot and was still allowing stolen-election crackpot (and loyal Fox advertiser) Mike “MyPillow” Lindell a platform on the network’s Tucker Carlson Tonight show. Why allow it? Presumably because he enjoys cashing Lindell’s fat checks. Questioned by Dominion’s attorneys, Murdoch agreed with the statement, “It is not red or blue, it is green.”

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Send your drawings of Trump pulling Murdoch’s strings to [email protected]. No new email alert subscriptions are being honored at this time. My Twitter feed is my robot. Nobody follows my Mastodon or Post accounts and who can blame them? My RSS feed has plans to fix the next Fox primary.

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Opinion | The George Santos Caucus Is Growing

The verdant canopy of lies tended by Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) requires no summary here. They’re so thick and leafy that they now block the sun from the forest floor. But he’s not the only freshman member who struggles when self-reporting. According to a recent Washington Post investigation, Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) can’t keep her ethnicity straight, claims to have grown up destitute and neglected when she didn’t, and appears to have incorrectly portrayed herself as the victim of a home invasion. (Luna has contested the Post story and won one correction and a clarification.) Meanwhile, Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) has claimed to be an economist (he’s not), re-rendered his minor position as a reserve sheriff’s deputy into a career as a crime-fighter cracking down on sex trafficking, and inflated his participation in non-degree classes at Vanderbilt and Dartmouth into claims of having attended their graduate schools.

Is a “Fib your way to Congress” trend emerging? Do the Santos, Luna and Ogles stories mark a failure of the press to fully vet candidates before Election Day? Or have candidates always embellished their pasts and gotten away with it until the Internet made it cheap and speedy to check their records? Or does this mini-epidemic of resume packing and fictionalized autobiographies point to something more revelatory — that everybody does it and accurate resumes and personal histories don’t matter when it comes to electing politicians?

Liars are supposed to appall us, but in practice, they don’t. America loves its scoundrels. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, which is about a prolific liar, ranks near the top polls of America’s best-loved novels. Its enduring lesson teaches that if you can’t make it, fake it, and nobody will be any the wiser by the time you succeed. Spoiler alert if you slept through high school English: Gatsby climbs to the top by lying about his name (it’s James Gatz), the origin of his wealth (bootlegging; moving counterfeit stocks; bribing public officials; working with gangsters), and his past (he was born poor in North Dakota, not rich in San Francisco). He ultimately gets knocked off, not in comeuppance for his lies, but in an act of revenge. (His killer mistakenly thinks Gatsby hit and killed his wife in traffic when actually Gatsby’s mistress Daisy was the wheelwoman.) The moral of The Great Gatsby is if you want to get ahead in American life, lie profusely — but make sure your sweetheart drives safely.

The Gatsby Directive has long been observed in corporate America, with executives routinely getting busted for resume padding. Academia, too, is shot through with professors who doctor their curriculum vitae. And you could fill a roadside Little Library with bestselling memoirs that turn out to be fake. In spinning their exaggerations and embroideries to political success, Santos, Luna and Ogles resemble President Joe Biden, who has dispensed one large dip of double-fudge after another throughout his entire political career. In a recent unrelenting column, the Washington Post’s Marc A. Thiessen truth-squaded Biden. The president’s many lies include those about his family history; about his college achievements; about getting arrested while trying to visit Nelson Mandela in prison; about getting arrested for protesting civil rights; about getting arrested for sneaking into the U.S. Capitol; about getting shot at inside Baghdad’s Green Zone; about pinning a Silver Star on a Navy Captain in Afghanistan; about cutting the federal deficit in half. And that’s just a partial list.

Of course, the volume and scale of Biden’s lies don’t compare to those of Donald Trump, who completely untethered himself from the truth during his administration. According to the Washington Post’s Fact Checker column, Trump made at least 30,573 false or misleading comments during his four years in the White House. Trump maintained such a unique relationship with the truth that it might have been simpler for the Post to tabulate his truthful statements than his lies. When the fact-checker first got going at Trump during the 2016 campaign, it looked like their accountings would fracture his credibility with voters, but it didn’t — or at least not enough to turn the election. Trump supporters discounted the fact that he was full of it because they liked many of the things he said about immigrants, foreign entanglements, Hillary Clinton, trade, economic growth and race. The same — although on a radically different scale — appears to be true with Biden supporters. When Joe blunders or overstates, they cover for him by saying, “Oh, that’s just Joe,” and change the subject.

If Santos, Luna and Ogles studied the political career of Donald Trump before composing their personal histories, nobody should be surprised. Trump established that while journalists care about the truth, voters can be more forgiving. If voters cared that much about campaign lies, the Democrats would have made the 2020 election an exercise in public shaming about Trump’s lies. But they didn’t. The only lies politicians must avoid are the ones that might trigger legal proceedings against them, like the iffy campaign finance statements Santos filed that have spurred investigations and might result in prosecution. Garden variety lies that aren’t prosecutable are regularly forgotten by voters by the time their speakers run for reelection.

Politicians lie, lie and lie some more because they’ve learned voters seem not to care much about it when the lies are uncovered. (In a perfect world, the press would fully vet every politician’s every statement, but even before the industry’s decline it didn’t have the resources to perform mass lie detection.) In the long run, voters seem not to care whether a candidate’s credentials are legitimate or if they really climbed Mt. Everest in their stocking feet as they attest on the husting. So why bother fluffing your resume in the first place if voters will only shrug when they discover you stretched the truth? Could it be that, like committing minor acts of vandalism or petty shoplifting, telling lies about ourselves feels too good to resist, especially when engaged in the contest that is politics, where every day brings another public exercise in resume comparison?

When it comes to politics, a candidate’s lived experience should be less important than where they stand on the issue. For that reason alone, we’d be better off if politicians competed by deflating their resumes instead of ballooning them.

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I do, however, want my neurosurgeon’s resume to be accurate. Send neurosurgeon references to [email protected]. No new email alert subscriptions are being honored at this time. My Twitter feed pitched in the World Series. My Mastodon account has invented a cure for cancer. My Post account saved a baby from being run over in traffic. My RSS feed has accomplished nothing and has no ambitions.

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Opinion | Where Nikki Haley Goes Wrong on Mental Competency Tests

When introducing a new product in a market segment already jammed with choices, the clever entrepreneur makes sure to add something punchy or memorable to his pitch to differentiate it. “Lasts all day.” “Infused with aloe.” “Built in the U.S.A.” Because she’s clever and because she’s entering what promises to be a crowded field, presidential aspirant Nikki Haley made the centerpiece of her Wednesday campaign kickoff a call for “mandatory mental competency tests for politicians over 75 years old.”

Haley, who is 51, did not pick the age of 75 at random. Her obvious targets were Donald Trump, who is 76 and aging fast, and Joe Biden, who is so old scientists use a combination of carbon dating and cutting off a limb to count the rings in order to determine his age. (Some have estimated Biden’s age at 80, but he could be older than a Greenland shark, which has been known to live 272 years.)

We shouldn’t automatically reject Haley’s proposal just because it’s a self-serving one that frames her as young and vital and her two leading potential opponents as old and in the way. Too often, people past their primes continue to hog jobs in government, in industry, in education and especially in journalism because it’s taboo (ageist, in contemporary parlance) to advocate methodical degeezering of our institutions. But the Haley proposal has some merit. How would it work? Would it improve governance? And does it have a chance of adoption?

Haley neglected to mention that it would probably take not just an act of Congress to impose mental competency tests for politicians but an amendment to the Constitution, which currently sets only minimum age limits on officeholders (35 for presidents, 30 for senators and 25 for members of the House).

Adding amendments to the Constitution is as difficult as getting the Detroit Lions into the Super Bowl. It’s not that it’s impossible, it’s just damn difficult.

But let’s say a constitutional amendment passed that imposed a competency test on elderly politicians. Who would compose the test and grade it? Would it be subject to appeal? Would the test become captive to people who want to rig it to arbitrarily eight-ball some candidates but approve others? Why should only those over 75 have to submit to the test? We all know 74-year-olds who are so addled you can’t trust them to cross the street by themselves.

Why limit the test to mental capacity? President Franklin D. Roosevelt was probably mentally fit for a fourth term in 1944, and run he did, but was he physically up to it? He died 82 days after his last inauguration. He was only 63.

A constitutional amendment designed to cull the incompetently elderly would have to be more simple — and less subject to interpretation — than a competency test. It would be consistent with the framers of the Constitution’s original design if an upper age limit were added to the requirements of the president, senator and representative to balance the current lower age limits. If you can be too young to be president, surely it makes sense that you can be too old even if some people under 35 could be terrific presidents and some over 75 could be the same.

In the past, imposing an upper age limit has been unnecessary because voters have pretty consistently culled the candidates before they age themselves into embarrassment. Not until Dwight D. Eisenhower did a president serve past the age of 70. The second to pass that milestone was Ronald Reagan, who left the White House just before turning 78. (Reagan seemed mentally wobbly at the end, but no solid evidence of dementia during his two terms as has ever surfaced.)

Trump, whose burgers and ice cream diet have him marked for a coronary or something worse, departed at 74. And a human fossil by the name of Joe now occupies the office. Do these four outliers over the past 62 years really justify setting an upper age limit for president? Shouldn’t that decision continue to reside with voters, and trust them to can make their own mental capacity assessments?

If Haley wants to replace the 20th-century leaders with 21st-century leaders, as she proposed in her Wednesday speech, she should attack the lower age barriers for office instead of imposing a test on older candidates and feeding them to the tumbril if they fail. Our new password should be if you’re old enough to vote, you should be old enough to run — for the House, the Senate or even the White House. Lowering the age restrictions would expand choice for all voters and give real competition to entrenched, older politicians. It might be too radical a proposal for some, but at least nobody will ever dismiss it as an “Infused with aloe” pitch.

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In Wild in the Streets, a 1968 youthsploitation movie from American International Pictures, the voting age drops to 14, 30 becomes the mandatory retirement age, and those over 35 are sent to reeducation camps where they are dosed with LSD. Make it happen. Send your constitutional amendments to [email protected]. No new email alert subscriptions are being honored at this time. My Twitter feed is 15 years old. My Mastodon and my Post accounts are still in diapers. My RSS feed subsists on a diet of Greenland sharks.

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Opinion | Cancel the State of the Union

How did the State of the Union — which owes its origin to a one-liner in the Constitution instructing the president to “from time to time give to the Congress Information of the state of the Union,” become an annual political carnival that requires an UltraMax security cordon to be cast over the Capitol Building, swallows hours of live TV coverage on a half dozen networks, and goads reams of pre- and post-analysis out of the typing press — become such an all-consuming gala?

The Constitution’s authors didn’t think the SOTU was essential, giving presidents the wide instruction that they must only address remarks to Congress “from time to time.” If the president stiffed Congress on the SOTU, no constitutional crisis would ensue. Nor must the president present his remarks in person. Every president from Thomas Jefferson to William Howard Taft produced remarks for Congress and then mailed them in. And the State of the Union wasn’t even called the State of the Union until the 1940s during Franklin Roosevelt’s reign. Previously it went by the more humble name of the “Annual Message.” Nor must the SOTU be an act of gasbaggery. President George Washington gave one in 1790 that clocked in at 1,089 words, about twice as long as the piece you’re now reading.

For all the pomp and pageantry, all the perfunctory standing ovations, and since President Ronald Reagan, the never-ending cast of “guests” in the bleacher seats who receive salutes from the president, the whole ceremony could be replaced by a simple email from the prez to members of Congress. No need to preempt regular broadcasts. No need to keep newscasters like Jake Tapper and Lester Holt and Norah O’Donnell up past their bedtimes. No need for griping columns like this one.

The State of the Union isn’t completely useless, as I argued here eight years ago. It can help a president shape and present his agenda to Congress and the public. But a well-written email or PowerPoint demonstration could probably do an equal job of organizing and explaining an administration’s ambitions for the coming year.

When assigning blame for the contemporary indulgence of the SOTU, the obvious villain is television. The event was once a daytime bit of programming. It didn’t become a prime-time show until President Lyndon Johnson gave his 1965 performance. Johnson delighted at having a forum that allowed him to speak directly to the public, unlike press conferences, which are frequently interrupted by pesky questions from reporters. Reagan supplemented his SOTU speeches with Hollywood stagecraft. Previously, the SOTU was a simple speech. But Reagan turned it into a show by casting everyday heroes, veterans, activists and others into his productions, prompting whistles and applause by calling out their names and goading them to stand up and receive congressional adulation. Subsequent presidents, especially Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, expanded the “folks in the crowd” gimmick so far that some years the “guests” became more notable than the speech itself. (I’ll bet President Bill Clinton wishes he could row back the honors he gave Sammy Sosa.) Today, the SOTU resembles an old-fashioned variety show, only with the president filling in for Ed Sullivan.

The SOTU has thrived as a public spectacle for the past 80 years because it taps into a human psyche that seems to demand annual festivals and celebrations that renew the human spirit. Most cultures, ancient and modern, have marked the new year with rituals that plot a new beginning for all concerned. For Christians, this time of renewal can by marked by Easter or Christmas. For agrarian societies, it came at harvest time. For drinkers, it’s New Year’s Eve. For politicians, the State of the Union has become the starting place for political renewal, a time when all the powers — Congress, the Supreme Court, the Joint Chiefs of Staff — await (or prepare to ignore) instructions from their maximum leader.

Like a religious observance, the SOTU is chockablock with ritual observances. It’s usually given on a Tuesday. The members of the Supreme Court must sit motionless, like sphinxes, and not applaud. The sergeant-at-arms of the U.S. House of Representatives welcomes the maximum lead with an introduction that never varies. “Mr. Speaker, the president of the United States!” The ritual sequesters a single cabinet official off-site (the “designated survivor”) to ascend to the presidency in case a bomb strikes the building and vaporizes all. And the speech always elicits as many standing ovations from members of the president’s party as you might witness at a Bruce Springsteen concert. The SOTU festival expanded its footprint in 1966, when the opposition party started giving its response to the president’s comments the same night.

None of this is necessary, of course. A simpler ritual observance marking the political new year could be instituted, maybe organized around the Super Bowl and income-tax season, or maybe just a countdown ball like the one used in Times Square. By reducing the SOTU to an email, we would save a lot of time and bother. It would discourage presidents from engaging in demagoguery. Presidential speechwriters would also be encouraged to make the message weightier. As the Guardian reported in 2013, SOTU addresses have grown linguistically dumber and dumber since Washington’s time.

And it might lower political temperatures. When Jefferson sent his comments to Congress instead of delivering them publicly like his predecessors, he said his intention was to preserve “harmony” in government. “By sending a message, instead of making a speech at the opening of the session,” he wrote, “I have prevented the bloody conflicts to which the making an answer would have commited [sic] them.”

It’s not too late, President Joe Biden. You can still cancel the public SOTU and send an email instead. Just let me know your email address ahead of time so I can set up an Outlook rule to send the message directly to the trash.

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Jake Tapper goes to bed at 7:30 p.m. every night except New Year’s Eve when he stays up until 10 p.m. Send SOTU trivia to [email protected]. No new email alert subscriptions are being honored at this time. My Twitter feed watches the SOTU on YouTube. My Mastodon and my Post accounts want to sit in the gallery and be called on by the president. My RSS feed has never given a standing ovation to anybody.

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Opinion | Why I Welcome Our Future AI Overlords

A minor panic surged through newsrooms recently as pundits began their speculation that ChatGPT, the speed-writing, new-fangled AI-powered text-generator, might start replacing human journalists. The collective newsroom blood pressure receded, however, when Futurism reported that the tech news site CNET was already using artificial intelligence to compose news stories but that in many cases, the stories were 1) inaccurate; 2) plagiarized; and 3) dull. ChatGPT might still be coming for our jobs, the journos sighed, but not this year or next, and soon returned to their fidget spinners, wastebasket basketball games and other professional procrastination devices.

The CNET debacle notwithstanding, the long march of ChatGPT and its AI siblings into newsrooms and everywhere that knowledge is manufactured and distributed will not be denied. Rather than resisting its encroachments, journalists would be smarter to recognize its potential to improve their work and better serve readers. ChatGPT isn’t the first technology to invade newsrooms to make journalism more exact, more timely and less expensive to create, and it won’t be the last.

The basest complaint in newsrooms is that AI will “steal” publishing jobs by deskilling work that “belongs” to people. Without a doubt, technology has been pilfering newsroom jobs for more than a century. The telephone increased reporter efficiency by allowing journalists to remain in the newsroom instead of wasting time traveling to collect stories. Photographs replaced newspaper and magazine illustrators. Computer typography displaced make-up room artists, typesetters and pressmen. Answering machines displaced telephone operators and secretaries. Word processors and spell-checking and grammar-checking software streamlined the jobs of writing, editing and copy editing. Transcription bots like Otter.ai have obliterated the transcriptionist slot. Reporters who once had to go to the library, consult the newspaper’s morgue or contact sources to assemble facts for a story now lean on Nexis and the web for much of the same grunt work.

Another complaint directed at newsroom AI is that even if it is cheaper and faster, it will only replace human intelligence with algorithmic rigidity, making everything sound like bland robot utterances. This complaint will first have to acknowledge that too few works of journalism have ever contained much in the way of literary merit. Magazine and newspaper style books — I’m looking at you, Associated Press Stylebook — have forever stitched their writers inside straitjackets to make every one of them echo the house style, making them sound like machines. Why accept the robotic output of today’s newspapers and magazines but object to copy written by actual machines?

Fine writing has a place, but you don’t find it very often in newspapers. But that’s okay. Fine writing has been fetishized for too long in too many places. We romanticize news writers — but shouldn’t — as swaggering geniuses who divine inspiration from the gods and pour their passion onto the page when what most of them actually do is just type. The most vital part of the creation of a newspaper story is in its reporting, not its writing. Newsrooms have long endorsed this idea, hiring reporters who could discover jaw-dropping original news, but couldn’t write a grocery list if they had a gun placed to their heads. Such journalists usually worked with editors or rewrite artists who rearranged their facts and findings into a comprehensible narrative. It will be a sad day when such editors are cashiered and their reporters pour their findings into an AI vessel and tell it how to arrange them into a story, but we shouldn’t lament that any more than we lamented the passing of the news illustrator.

The first newsroom jobs AI will take will be the data-heavy but insight-empty ones that nobody really wants: The breaking news of Microsoft’s third-quarter earnings, tomorrow’s weather report, a condensation of last night’s Tigers-Yankees game or the rewrite of a windy corporate or government press release. But eventually AI will come for more ambitious work, such as investigations, eyewitness reportage and opinion journalism like what you’re reading right now. We shouldn’t fear that take-over if it produces better journalism. Press critic A.J. Liebling once boasted, “I can write faster than anyone who can write better, and I can write better than anyone who can write faster.” AI can write faster than A.J now. When the day comes that it can write faster and better, the Lieblings of this world ought to stand aside.

Will that day ever come? ChatGPT and the other AIs of the future will only be as good as their software and what they’ve been told. The only thing AIs “know” at this point is what somebody’s told them. Real news — the stuff that nobody wants you to know in the first place — does not reside in an AI’s learning base until somebody deposits it in their hard drives. In the near-term at least, AI will still depend on humans’ intelligence to generate novel information and arguments not folded into its corpus. By deskilling the writing of mundane and everyday stories, AI will free human journalists to asks questions it can’t yet imagine and produce results beyond its software powers. It’s only as smart as the people behind it.

Evidence of AI’s shortcomings were revealed to me when I asked ChatGPT to construct a hypothetical conservative brief for the repeal of Obergefell, the Supreme Court’s decision legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide. “It is not appropriate or legal to argue for overturning a Supreme Court decision that guarantees this fundamental right,” ChatGPT responded. No matter how the request was rephrased, it kept insisting it was inappropriate and illegal to do so. Even when instructed that settled law is occasionally unsettled by a new decision (as Justice Clarence Thomas appears to desire in this case), it would not relent. “While it is legal to argue for the overturning of a Supreme Court decision, it is not appropriate or legal to argue for a decision that would discriminate against individuals based on their sexual orientation,” it illogically stated.

For now, at least, my job seems safe. But we can foresee the day that given the proper prompts, better data, a longer leash, better software and a more productive spleen, AI will replace me as a columnist, devising better column ideas and composing better copy. But until it fully understands what it means to be human, how to be curious and how to sate that craving, and how to replicate human creativity, there will be acts of journalism beyond its reach.

Journalism has always been a collaborative craft, joining sources to reporters, reporters to editors, and then readers back to publication in an endless loop of knowledge production. If AI can join that loop to help make accurate, more readable journalism with greater impact, we shouldn’t ban it. Journalism doesn’t exist to give credentialed reporters and editors a steady paycheck. It exists to serve readers. If AI helps newsrooms better serve readers, they should welcome its arrival.

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Politico.com

Opinion | The New York Times’ Obsession with Itself

If Page A1 of the New York Times is the most valuable two square feet of real estate in newspaper history, what then is the paper’s next page, A2?

Even print subscribers who don’t read the paper in its entirety reliably flip to A2 before abandoning it for their commute or web browsing. A2’s value, and that of its sister page, A3, was reflected in the premium that advertisers paid for placement in those spaces two decades ago, as luxury retailers like Cartier, Tourneau, Burberry, Tiffany, Mikimoto, Saks Fifth Avenue, Bulgari, Cole Haan and other high-end shops would line up to park their ads in that privileged space.

Even though advertisers no longer flock to A2 — or any other part of the paper, for that matter — A2 remains choice real estate. But for unfathomable reasons, Times editors routinely dedicate a majority of its acreage to what appears to be their favorite topic: The Times itself. Most days, a self-glorifying feature titled “The Story Behind the Story” runs on A2 that presents “insider” looks at Times coverage that can only be read as advertisements for the Times itself.

Defying the journalistic maxim that reporters should never be the story, “The Story Behind the Story” frequently chronicles the mundane mechanics of assembling the Times. Recently, the space has featured a first-person piece by a Times reporter about how she got her story about the things people stand in line for these days; how its book critic read and reviewed Prince Harry’s Spare in a day; how its reporter found sources for a piece about young people and personal finance; how its reporter covered the recent 5.6 magnitude earthquake in West Java; inside commentary on the paper’s crossword; a profile of the paper’s photography department; and a profile of a food-truck proprietor who vends on the street outside the Times’ offices.

Other days the feature runs Q&A’s with reporters in which they regurgitate the facts they’ve already conveyed in published pieces about classified documents, Ticketmaster, and the recent German coup plot. (Some of these Q&A’s are double-dribbled from the Times’ “The Daily” podcast.) Then there have been retrospectives on the influence of the paper’s “Snow Fall” feature from 10 years ago and a history of the guest book at Times headquarters. It would be one thing if any of these pieces broke ground or were great reads, but they don’t and they aren’t. Most days’ entries have that tossed off quality that passes for insight when applied to podcasts. The reading experience is like soaking your brain in brackish well water.Perhaps nobody has ever attacked these columns because nobody ever reads them.

The feature swells with such clueless self-regard some days that it recalls former New Republic Editor Michael Kinsley’s jokey response to a colleague who asked him to concoct a magazine title that would appeal to hardcore New Republic readers. Kinsley pitch was New Republic World: The Magazine for Readers of the New Republic. By giving the Times readers re-tastings of pieces they’ve already read, the paper accomplishes the ouroboros design Kinsley imagined.

In theory, a continuing Times feature that critically examined the paper’s output could be salutary for both Times readers and journalists. At a time when radical transparency is in vogue and the need to demystify journalism to a skeptical public has never been greater, “The Story Behind the Story” could be an essential campaign to reading the Times. But in its current form, the project does not come close to serving any real function. It’s unworthy of an institution like the Times.

In theory, an enterprising editor could raise the standards and demand work that is as newsworthy as other Times stories. In fact, the paper has a recent tradition of critical self-reflection. For 14 years, the paper hosted the public editor column that, with varying success, X-rayed and fanny-whacked the Times’ coverage. But the paper spiked the exercise in introspection in 2017, with Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. offering that the “watchdogs” of social media and “readers across the Internet” could fill the void left by the public editor’s departure.

Even after the vanquishing of the public editor, the paper still ran its barbed media column, launched by the late David Carr and continued by Jim Rutenberg and Ben Smith, which occasionally made the Times its subject. But the paper has yet to replace Smith, who departed about a year ago for his Semafor venture, which means that just about the only place in the Times to read about the Times is this soft, accommodating feature that denies its writers the freedom to be fully honest about how their stories come together. Trust me, reader, sometimes the process can be very ugly. Other times, as we’ve seen from the Times feature attests, it’s as exciting as going grocery shopping.

Properly reconstituted, the Times insider feature could take up the slack created by the cashiering of the public editor and the failure to replace Smith. If the paper’s true objective is to reveal “who we are and what we do” and deliver “behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together,” “The Story Behind the Story” could do just that by engaging in Maoist self-criticism exercises that confess the paper’s miscues and goofs and state the paper’s case against its critics.

You could successfully argue that griping about the misuse of a valuable Times print perch in an era when most people engage the paper in its online incarnation is a wasted complaint. But setting the feature’s placement aside, you’re still left with the reality that the world’s top newspaper thinks running an extended, onanistic public relations campaign for itself is a good use of its journalists’ and readers’ time. The first question of any act of journalism is, does the story matter? The second is, who cares? In the case of “The Story Behind the Story,” the answers are “no” and “nobody.”

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Public Editor Daniel Okrent was, by far, the best of the Times' public editors. Get his collected columns, Public Editor #1, for $4.50 on Abebooks. Send brackish well-water to [email protected]. No new email alert subscriptions are being honored at this time. My Twitter feed needs a public editor. My Mastodon account has marked my Post account for death. My RSS feed blankets itself with the print version of the Times for its afternoon naps

Politico.com

Opinion | Sloppy Joe

The American government flows on a chugging river of paperwork, so it’s not surprising a trickle of Very Important Classified Documents came to rest improperly in a locked closet at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, a think tank where Joe Biden had maintained an office. It’s no excuse, but who among us has not disobeyed — either willfully or accidentally — some important legal or ethical directive?

Biden, after all, is human. But when the second dribble of Very Important Classified Documents was discovered in the garage of his home in Wilmington, Del., my sympathy for Biden began to quiver as a pattern began to emerge. Whenever I lift secret documents to read at my leisure in an insecure setting along with my newspapers, novels and comic books, I store them securely where no unauthorized person can access them, like in an unmarked manila envelope under my mattress. But Biden had to know better. He spent 36 years in the U.S. Senate, and he chaired or served as ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee for 12 years. Classified information was served to him in such steady, abundant portions during his years of office that he could have been fattened and put to market in nine months had he eaten them instead of read them.

Such a bad showing. Surely Biden was lectured dozens of times on the proper handling of Very Important Classified Documents while in the Senate. Surely he received an annual refresher course in classified document handling during the eight years he towed the vice-presidential yoke (along with former Veep Mike Pence, who has now joined the document-purloining team). So when a third and then a fourth batch of Very Important Classified Documents (six, to be exact) percolated to the surface after a 13-hour rummage of the Biden Wilmington residence by Justice Department investigators, my patience popped. Biden would be cashiered from almost any job in the private sector had he treated privileged documents so cavalierly. Our president is a sloppy Joe.

Some say it’s to Biden’s credit that he’s cooperated with investigators, unlike Donald Trump, who has variously insisted that he declassified the documents improperly stored at his residence, that they belong to him and that the documents were planted by the FBI. (I keep waiting for him to say he can wallpaper Mar-a-Lago with the docs if he wants.) But why give Biden cover because he’s acknowledging he’s in the wrong and is helping the cops instead of fighting them? Biden’s purported violations represent extreme negligence.At least Trump is forthright about his mishandling of documents. He never thought the secrecy rules applied to him, which is why he routinely leaked sensitive intelligence while president. Nobody thinks that Biden, who knows better, intentionally made off with the documents. He just shrugged off the rules like a reckless driver.

Wasn’t it supposed to be different? Wasn’t the Biden presidency supposed to mark the return of grown-ups and professionalism to the White House? Weren’t Biden’s hallmarks his pedigree and experience, his competency and diligence? Or, setting aside his deficiencies for a moment, wasn’t Biden supposed to have surrounded himself with an able team of advisers who have been with him for decades, some back to his days in Delaware politics, to guide and protect him? What were they doing to protect Biden when the Very Important Classified Documents bled out to his think-tank office, his garage and his house, and stored for years? Or, are they just as sloppy as Biden and carriers of over-inflated reputations?

You could attribute Biden’s document bungles to his age. He’s now 80, after all. But that excuse doesn’t stanch his self-inflected wound. Sloppiness has been Biden’s signature move for as long as he’s practiced politics. Over the course of his political career, Biden has gaffed the way Mount Etna erupts — in steady, hot, gassy burps. In 1987 while running for president, he sloppily pinched major parts of a British politician's speech and called it his own. Last March, in a seemingly off-the-cuff statement that appeared to challenge Russia to start World War III, Biden said that Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power,” which sounded like a direct call for regime change. The White House immediately walked back his statement, as it frequently does, saying, “The president’s point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region. He was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia, or regime change.” Oh, sure. As this recent New York Post piece charting Biden’s presidential gaffes, he’s grown hotter and gassier, indicating an inability to edit or discipline himself.

To put it in the vernacular, he’s very sloppy.

The White House clean-up crew that follows Biden 24/7 to undo his gaffes will probably rescue him from his Very Important Classified Documents catastrophe. When the Biden doc discoveries commenced, pundits speculated that they amounted to an unintended gift to Trump: Even though the two cases are not directly comparable, it would look bad to punish Trump for making off with documents but not Biden (who can’t be indicted anyway under Department of Justice rules). But as the classified documents pile up on Biden’s door — who knows where they’ll find them next, his Rehoboth Beach pad? — Trump’s document troubles now look like a gift to Biden. What Biden did was wrong, his supporters will argue, but he didn’t deliberately take them, like Trump. What’s the big deal? He’s always been sloppy Joe, this logic goes, he will always be sloppy Joe. What did you expect?

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Politico.com

Opinion | George Santos Isn’t Going Anywhere

You might think that Congress is no place for a confessed liar under criminal investigation,like the recently sworn-in Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.). But you’d be wrong.

Santos, who faces just-revived check-fraud charges in Brazil, has yet to be charged in the United States, but that may change soon. A nonpartisan watchdog group has filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission accusing Santos of illegally concealing the source of campaign funds and of using donor cash to cover his personal rent. The Santos campaign also appears to have overspent on air travel, hotels and car services. Dozens of expenditures of $199.99 logged in disclosure forms — just a penny shy of the $200 threshold that requires receipts — hint at additional violations. If that isn’t bad enough, Patch just reported that Santos appears to have screwed the pooch by absconding with $3,000 from a GoFundMe set up for an ailing dog in Queens, N.Y.

If Santos worked anywhere else, he’d be wheeled out to the curb on trash day. But Congress is a great place to hang out and collect a paycheck if you’re charged with breaking the law. As nice as it would be to blame Santos on Donald Trump, who normalized lying and criminal behavior while in office, you can’t stick this one on the former president. Congress has long looked the other way when its members misbehave. More than two dozen members of the House and Senate have been charged with crimes since 1980, mostly for accepting bribes. In most cases, charged members put their heads down for the duration of their prosecution and resign if convicted (or decline to run for reelection). But they don’t have to resign. According to a Congressional Research Service report from 2014, no federal statute or House rule commands a lawmaker to leave Congress if indicted or convicted of a felony. Expulsion requires a two-thirds majority of the House, and only two convicted members have been expelled in modern times — Michael Myers of Pennsylvania and Jim Traficant of Ohio.

If Santos has checked the historical record — and you can bet he has — he would rightly figure that Congress is the best place for him to lounge for the next two years. And maybe beyond. At the end of December, POLITICO’s Olivia Beavers reported that Santos had told New York party leaders that he wouldn’t seek reelection in 2024. But last Friday, he fended off calls for his resignation by indicating he might seek vindication by running again. And why shouldn’t he keep his seat or run again? The job pays $174,000 a year and with five years of federal employment comes a nice pension. Plus, a House seat allows him to boss all those staffers around. And don’t forget franking privileges!

In normal times, Santos’ gross résumé inflation and other lies would earn him a cold shoulder from all Republicans. But these are not normal times. Given the party’s slim majority, every vote counts, even a liar’s vote. Santos wisely barnacled himself to Speaker Kevin McCarthy as quickly as he could, voting for him on all 15 ballots in the speaker race, and his loyalty has earned him two congressional committee slots — Small Business and Science, Space, and Technology. Santos is said to have coveted finance and foreign policy assignments, but small matter. He can always claim on his résumé that he got those committees. As long as the Republican leadership can count on Santos to vote the party line, he remains a net legislative asset for them.

New York state Republicans have denounced Santos because he makes them look bad, but it’s a different matter in the House. So far, only a handful of Republican lawmakers have demanded his resignation because if he were to resign, his district could easily swing Democratic, diminishing the tiny Republican majority.

“I will NOT resign!” Santos tweeted a week ago. This stand is more practical than principled. As Ben Jacobs noted in Vox, clutching his seat might give him some plea-bargaining leverage if and when federal prosecutors come calling. (Copping a plea spared Vice President Spiro Agnew jail time in 1973.) Santos might figure that surrendering his seat in Congress will only earn him a quicker seat in prison. The question only Santos can answer right now is how hefty is his criminal liability? Might his crimes be so expansive and easily proved that the feds will decline to offer him any sort of deal?

In the short term, we’re stuck with Santos. Serving in Congress is the best job he’s ever had. The Republicans need him. And members of Congress can’t be recalled. But in the long term, he’s toast.