Reporters as Detectives

Newsweek's Jonathan Alter apparently didn't get the memo that the media must incessantly predict a Democratic victory:

"Striking national polling numbers like the ones we are seeing won't necessarily translate into a huge victory for Democrats. True, the party out of power has historically made great gains in the sixth year of a two-term presidency. But while the odds now strongly favor the Democrats' taking the 15 seats necessary to win control of the House, caution is still advisable on a blowout."

Power Line's John Hinderaker looks at the (possible) anatomy of a leak:

"One of the Democrats' several September Surprises was the highly selective, and highly misleading, leak of a small portion of the recently-completed National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. The Associated Press reported that House Intelligence Committee chairman Peter Hoekstra has suspended a Democratic committee staffer and denied him or her access to classified information, pending an investigation into whether that staffer was the source of the NIE leak.

"As far as the AP's report indicates, the only evidence against the staffer is the fact that he or she 'requested the document from National Intelligence Director John Negroponte three days before a Sept. 23 story by the Times on its conclusions.' That could be a coincidence, of course; on the other hand, there may be more evidence of which we are unaware.

"If a Democratic committee staffer was responsible for the misleading and presumaably illegal leak, there could be political consequences. In a broader sense, though, I don't think it makes much difference. Historically, the Democrats haven't had to rely on committee staffers for leaks, because there are plenty of loyal, committed Democrats embedded in the intelligence agencies who willingly leak to loyal, committed Democrats who work for the New York Times, Washington Post and other media outlets."

I wish the learned Mr. Hinderaker would get off this "committed Democrats" in the MSM line. Want to charge liberal bias, be my guest. But the supposedly committed Dems at the NYT and WP sure managed to savage Bill Clinton.

That Kuo book is still making news, as the New Republic's Michael Crowley blogs:

"I hadn't seen this great anecdote from David Kuo's juicy book, Tempting Faith, an insider's account of the Bush White House's corrupt 'faith-based' policymaking. It deals with a controversial December 2002 Esquire piece in which Bush's former faith-based czar, John DiIulio, was quoted trashing Bush's policy operation as hollow and Bush's overall 'compassionate conservative' agenda as having accomplished nothing. After the article appeared, writes Kuo:

" A West Wing friend called to say the president heard about the article as he walked from the Oval office of the OEOB. He was angry. 'Well,' he yelled through the stairwell, 'is he right or isn't he? Have we done compassion or haven't we? I wanna know.'An hour later we got the first and only call from the deputy chief of staff Josh Bolton's office requesting an urgent 'compassion meeting.' In the two years since the transition, it was the first time the president's senior staff fully engaged in the compassion agenda . . . The president's question first needed to be answered. He wanted to know how much we had spent on compassion programs in his first two years in office. We made some calls and did some calculations and discovered that if we applied his definition of compassion to federal social [services] programs, we were actually spending about $20 million a year less on them than before he had taken office. That number never actually made it to the president. The question was deemed, 'still in process of being accounted for .'

"Remember, Bush's entire 2000 campaign was organized around the 'compassionate conservative' theme. Yet midway through his first term, Bush had no idea whether he was living up to his label--and his aides wouldn't even tell him the truth was quite the opposite."

The somewhat nasty debate about outing gay Republicans produces this thoughtful Salon piece by Alex Koppelman :

"In 2003, the Washington Blade was preparing a story on the sexual orientation of Florida congressman Mark Foley. By then, Foley's homosexuality was an open secret -- he had been outed by journalist Kurt Wolfe on a New York radio show in 1996.

"What was not widely known was that Kirk Fordham, Foley's then-chief of staff, was also gay. The Blade knew it, however, and so editor Chris Crain asked Fordham how, and whether, he wanted his sexual orientation identified in the paper. Fordham's response was that he was 'out in the community but not in the press,' and so the Blade refrained, for a time, from printing anything about Fordham's life as an openly gay man.

"This situation is one now faced on a regular basis by reporters and editors in Washington, forcing them to ask questions about how and when they should report on sexual orientation. In an era in which the closet is no longer what it once was, when supposedly closeted individuals may be out to nearly everyone in their life, is it the media's responsibility to help public figures hide the truth from voters? And in the wake of the Foley scandal, does the press need to reevaluate how it deals with the issue?

"Complicating matters for many journalists is Washington's unique and complicated version of 'out.' Some of D.C.'s public figures intentionally cultivate vagueness when it comes to just how out of the closet they are. Fordham was far from the only political operative or official to consider himself out in some situations and not in others. Some 'closeted' staffers live active lives inside Washington's gay community, patronizing local gay bars and cohabiting openly with same-sex partners. Some are out to their bosses, even bosses who are ultraconservative Republicans -- Robert Traynham, the director of communications for Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., was reportedly out to his boss before being outed in the press. Still, D.C.'s political class maintains a special distinction between living as openly gay in Washington's gay community and being identified as such in the press, where word might get back to the home congressional district."