No Laughter Allowed?

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 30, 2007 8:58 AM

Sometimes I wonder whether the media are draining every last ounce of spontaneity out of politics.

Every candidate now knows, at any moment of the day or night, anything you say can and will be used against you.

Take this harmless Hillary joke. Repeating a question from an Iowa resident over the weekend, she says the person wanted to know "what in my background equips me to deal with evil and bad men"--and shoots the audience a look. Everyone laughs.

OMG! Was she taking about Bill?? Who else could she have meant? Another excuse to talk about The Marriage!

So the senator gets peppered with questions by reporters, expresses exasperation ("You guys keep telling me, 'Lighten up, be funny' ") and winds up on the cover of the New York Post and the bite keeps getting replayed on television. So much for her position on Iraq.

If we've left no room for humor in politics, we've created a problem. One of the reasons that John McCain got good press in 2000 is that he let reporters ride around with him on his bus, and since they were getting an unvarnished view of the man, warts and all, they didn't jump on every wisecrack and try to pump it up into news. In a terrific Vanity Fair profile, Todd Purdum frames the question this way: "What's so different about--and potentially risky for--McCain is his perpetual willingness to think out loud, unplugged and unfiltered."

Most candidates aren't--and that's in part because of the media's perpetual "gotcha" stance. Why risk having a one-liner turn into a one-week controversy? This, in turn, gives rise to the poll-tested, focus-grouped, blow-dried robo-pols--precisely the sort that reporters complain are boring. They are boring. But it's become dangerous to be interesting.

Why does everyone feel free to give Hillary Rodham Clinton personal advice? The latest is from London Daily Mail blogger Don Surber:

"Let's cut to the chase: The Hillary campaign is held back by one man. Divorce him.

"Divorce is a family value. My maternal grandmother divorced her first husband. My mother divorced my father. Three of my four sisters are divorced. Hell, Tammy Wynette divorced. Twice.

"Divorce is what happens when the marriage contract is irreparably damaged. It has nothing to do with love, but everything to do with survival.

"Every day, hundreds of young women with little babies to feed work up the courage to divorce the rat they married. Hillary should dump him already.

"If Britney Spears is smart enough to dump K-Fed, surely the valedictorian of the Wellesley Class of '69 can figure this out."

Yo: Maybe she's still into him.

The New Republic's Jonathan Chait comes up with a novel scheme to derail Hillary's candidacy: Repeal the 22nd Amendment.

"The Hillary Clinton campaign is a product of the fact that her husband can't run for reelection. She is certainly highly intelligent and qualified to hold the presidency, but if her husband was running, she wouldn't be. People react to her candidacy largely on the basis of how they felt about Bill Clinton. Those who yearn for a return to his policies generally support her; those who disliked his policies don't."

He'd like Bubba to run against W.

Big buzz about the Ari testimony-under-immunity yesterday, where he said that Scooter Libby told him about the CIA status of Joe Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame:

"Mr. Fleischer's day on the stand provided a riveting moment because of the detailed description of the conversation, which he said occurred in his last week at the White House and was the only time Mr. Libby had ever asked him to lunch," the New York Times reports.

" . . . But it was Mr. Fleischer's testimony that seemed the most damaging to date. He said he had heard again about Ms. Wilson four days later from the White House communications director, Dan Bartlett, aboard Air Force One as it was heading to Uganda. He said Mr. Bartlett was reading documents and began 'venting' that reporters kept repeating Mr. Wilson's claim that it was Mr. Cheney who had sent Mr. Wilson on his fact-finding trip.

" 'His wife sent him,' Mr. Fleischer recalled Mr. Bartlett saying. 'She works at the C.I.A.'

"Mr. Fleischer said he relayed that information to reporters from Time and NBC, a fact that figured in his later demand that he would testify only after being given a grant of immunity from prosecution." The reporters were Time's John Dickerson and NBC's David Gregory.

"When the investigation began in the fall of 2003, he said he was suddenly afraid he had inadvertently violated the law.

"He said that, upon reading that Ms. Wilson's identity was classified, he thought to himself, 'Oh my God, did I somehow play a role in outing a C.I.A. operative?' "

But wait! John Dickerson dissents:

"I wanted to raise my hand and ask, 'Your Honor, may I approach the bench?'

"I was at the Scooter Libby trial to cover it, and all of a sudden, I found myself in the middle of the case. In his testimony today, former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer told the courtroom--which included me--that when I was a White House correspondent for Time magazine, he had told me that Joe Wilson's wife worked at the CIA.

He did? . . .

"I have a different memory. My recollection is that during a presidential trip to Africa in July 2003, Ari and another senior administration official had given me only hints. They told me to go inquire about who sent Wilson to Niger. As far as I can remember--and I am pretty sure I would remember it--neither of them ever told me that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA. In a piece I wrote about a year ago, I figured that the very reason I'd never been subpoenaed in the case or questioned by any lawyers was that I'd been given only vague guidance and not the good stuff.

"So, what to do now that I'd heard Ari's testimony? Should I stand? Should I shout a question at Ari? Should I walk from the press section into the witness box? Call a press conference? Get a lawyer?"

Or just blog it?

Finally, Bush is confronted on the "ic" factor--why did he refer to the "Democrat Party" in his State of the Union?

" 'That was an oversight,' Bush said in an interview Monday with National Public Radio. 'I'm not trying to needle . . . I didn't even know I did it.' "

Mitt Romney has been very, ah, creative in his fundraising, the Wall Street Journal says:

"Because he doesn't hold federal office, Mr. Romney became subject to the federal rules only after he set up a presidential exploratory committee earlier this month. Until then, his team took advantage of a little-noticed gap between federal and state law. While most states limit political donations, about a dozen don't. Mr. Romney's political team set up fund-raising committees in three of those: Michigan, Iowa and Alabama. During that time, his political action committees raised $7 million."

In the Iraq debate, I'm seeing more and more talk about how we didn't need to lose Vietnam, as in this piece by Fred Barnes:

"Certain parallels between Iraq and Vietnam are uncanny. A new general, David Petraeus, is taking over in Iraq with a credible new strategy, counterinsurgency. Four decades ago, General Creighton Abrams became the American commander in Vietnam, also with a new strategy. It called for taking and holding the villages and hamlets of South Vietnam. In a word, it was counterinsurgency, and it worked. Now in Iraq, Petraeus has as good a chance of success, starting with the pacification of Baghdad, as Abrams had. And the painful lesson of Vietnam applies in Iraq: Don't give up when victory is at hand.

"Those in Congress who advocate retreat in Iraq refuse to acknowledge this lesson. And they may have their way, whatever Petraeus accomplishes. With their calls for troop withdrawals and fund cutoffs and their antiwar resolutions, they have put America on a slippery slope in Iraq. And we know where it leads: to defeat while victory remains quite possible. This happened in six descending steps in Vietnam, and today's coalition in Congress of antiwar Democrats and vacillating Republicans has started pushing us down that dangerous slope."

The LAT pokes into a Harry Reid land deal:

"It's hard to buy undeveloped land in booming northern Arizona for $166 an acre. But now-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid effectively did just that when a longtime friend decided to sell property owned by the employee pension fund that he controlled.

"In 2002, Reid (D-Nev.) paid $10,000 to a pension fund controlled by Clair Haycock, a Las Vegas lubricants distributor and his friend for 50 years. The payment gave the senator full control of a 160-acre parcel in Bullhead City that Reid and the pension fund had jointly owned. Reid's price for the equivalent of 60 acres of undeveloped desert was less than one-tenth of the value the assessor placed on it at the time.

"Six months after the deal closed, Reid introduced legislation to address the plight of lubricants dealers who had their supplies disrupted by the decisions of big oil companies. It was an issue the Haycock family had brought to Reid's attention in 1994, according to a source familiar with the events. If Reid were to sell the property for any of the various estimates of its value, his gain on the $10,000 investment could range from $50,000 to $290,000."

Stop the cyberpresses: a positive story about Bush! Slate's Gregg Easterbrook has it:

"It 'fell far short' (Washington Post editorial) and offers only 'marginal' gains (New York Times editorial) and is 'nonsense' (Charles Krauthammer) and 'isn't much' (Thomas Friedman). All these are descriptions of the energy policy proposal in George W. Bush's State of the Union address last week. They don't match the plan itself.

"Last week Bush proposed something environmentalists, energy analysts, greenhouse-effect researchers, and national-security experts have spent 20 years pleading for: a major strengthening of federal mileage standards for cars, SUVs, and pickup trucks. The number-one failing of U.S. energy policy is that vehicle mile-per-gallon standards have not been made stricter in two decades. Nothing the United States can do in energy policy is more important than an mpg increase. Presidents George Herbert Walker Bush, Bill Clinton, and, until last week, George W. Bush had all refused to face the issue of America's low-mpg vehicles, which are the root of U.S. dependency on Persian Gulf oil and a prime factor in rising U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions. But now Bush favors a radical strengthening of federal mileage rules, and last week to boot became the first Republican president since Gerald Ford to embrace the basic concept of federal mileage regulation (called the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standard).

"This should have been Page One headline material--PRESIDENT CALLS FOR DRAMATIC MPG REGULATIONS. Instead, most news organizations pretended Bush's mpg proposal did not exist, or buried the story inside the paper, or made only cryptic references to it. In his 2006 State of the Union address, when Bush said America was 'addicted to oil' but proposed no mpg improvements, critics rightly pummeled the president. Now Bush has backed the needed reform, and the development is being downplayed or even ridiculed.

"What's going on? First, mainstream news organizations and pundits are bought and sold on a narrative of Bush as an environmental villain and simply refuse to acknowledge any evidence that contradicts the thesis."

When John Edwards was reported to have bought the most expensive house in Orange County, N.C., Matt Stoller of MyDD had this to say:

"Color me disgusted at both his arrogance and strategically poor sense. What is wrong with these politicians that they don't feel the need to live their values? Two Americas is a great message for most Americans, but apparently not John Edwards."

But now Stoller says he was unduly influenced by the political right.

"In this case, I was angry, and did not act analytically. And the right was there, taking advantage to embed a meme about John Edwards into my head.

"It's going to be an ugly campaign. I don't share the illusion about the right, and about myself, that I am somehow above the propaganda. It affects me. TV is powerful, and so are rumors and a really well developed right-wing narrative built into our cultural system, and into my head. I have to work against this every day, and I expect that this is true for many of us."

National Review headline: "There Are Two Americas; John Edwards' New House Takes Up Almost All of One Of Them."

Ed Morrissey isn't ready to give his heart away yet--and advises others to hold off as well:

"Center-right and conservative bloggers have not had any experience with a wide-open primary season. In 2000, the blogosphere hardly existed, and by 2004 we knew that George Bush would have no serious competition for his renomination. The 2008 campaign is tabula rasa for Republican bloggers, more so since we have no incumbent vice president vying for the nomination . . .

"My advice, for those who want it, would be for bloggers to refrain from identifying with any one candidate until we get much closer to the primaries. For one thing, we have not necessarily seen all of the candidates yet. More importantly, we have not really seen their campaigning style and effort. 2007 should be considered a test for this wide-open field to make the best case and to hone their craft. Thanks to an early advent of the campaign, we have almost twelve months to consider each candidate, and we should take full advantage of that.

"Perhaps the greatest reason for restraint is to make sure that our voices are heard on the issues rather than the candidates. Affiliated blogs will find themselves with less influence among other candidates, and for me, I'm more interested in the policies than I am in the personalities. If I endorse one candidate over all the rest, my opinions will have considerably less impact on other campaigns (for as much impact as I have anyway)."

The brother of Mark Green, the former New York City official and mayoral candidate, is bailing out bankrupt Air America.

This Seattle Times lead about what's been dubbed " sexpresso" drew plenty of interest:

"In a short, sheer, baby-doll negligee and coordinated pink panties, Candice Law is dressed to work at a drive-through espresso stand in Tukwila, and she is working it."

There were lots of complaints about the scantily dressed baristas (though I thought the photos were pretty tame).

Finally, Bill Keller keeps trying to restrain himself from reading the blogs. Marketwatch's Jon Friedman chats with the New York Times editor:

" 'I've dialed back on my consumption of blogs,' Keller said (somewhat proudly). It has been challenging because, he noted, like most journalists, he is 'competitive and thin-skinned.'

"His policy is to 'distinguish between the serious stuff and the not-serious stuff,' he said of the criticism. 'I don't let it get to me.'

"A turning point came when Jill Abramson, the Times managing editor, 'advised me to stop reading Romenesko,' he said with a grin, referring to a widely read media-industry blog. Abramson had told him: 'If there's anything on there, you'll hear about it before lunch.'

"Keller noted that, yes, he continues to glance at the Romenesko and Media Bistro Web sites, among others. But he adds, with some measure of satisfaction: 'I'm not obsessive about it any more.' "

Sounds like a 12-step program and he's on step 3.