The Old Eighteen

George Stephanopoulos interviews John McCain

How Stephy's interview with Grandpa John might go down, if he applies the same journalistic standards he went by during the Democratic debate:

"Tough, fair, relevant, and appropriate"

John McCain is appearing tomorrow morning on This Week With Sean Hannity George Stephanopoulos.  BarbinMD at Daily Kos thinks that Stephy should hold his interview with Grandpa John to the same rigorous standards that he and Charles Gibson applied to their questions for Barack Obama in the Democratic debate earlier this week, so in that vein, she's made a handy reference list of questions for Stephy to use during his interview.  Cliff Schecter over at AMERICAblog also has a list of his own.

"A species apart"

Theda Skocpol was at the meeting where Hillary Clinton reportedly made her "screw 'em" remark about white middle-class voters, and she shares her recollections about the conversation that day:

But what is clear in both in my memory and my notes is that there was extensive, hard-nosed discussion about why masses of voters did not support Clinton or trust government or base their choices on economic as opposed to what people saw as peripheral life-style concerns. Hillary Clinton was among the most cold-blooded analysts in attendance. She spoke of ordinary voters as if they were a species apart, and showed interest only in the political usefulness of their choices -- usefulness to the Clinton administration, that is.

Based on the rationale that George Stephanopoulos used for dredging up "Bittergate" and Barack Obama's flag pin, it seems that Hillary Clinton's expressed disdain for working-class whites would have been an appropriate topic for discussion.  So why wasn't it even brought up, much less given the lengthy, detailed attention that the moderators devoted to the question of whether Obama loves America as much as Jeremiah Wright does?

More fallout from the debate

Obama's memoir dripped with contempt for modern gotcha politics, for a campaign culture obsessed with substantively irrelevant but supposedly symbolic gaffes like John Kerry ordering Swiss cheese or Al Gore sighing or George H.W. Bush checking his watch or Michael Dukakis looking dorky in a tank. [...]

Last night at the National Constitution Center, at a Democratic debate that was hyped by ABC as a discussion of serious constitutional issues, America got to see exactly what Obama was complaining about. At a time of foreign wars, economic collapse and environmental peril, the cringe-worthy first half of the debate focused on such crucial matters as Senator Obama's comments about rural bitterness, his former pastor, an obscure sixties radical with whom he was allegedly "friendly," and the burning constitutional question of why he doesn't wear an American flag pin on his lapel — with a single detour into Senator Hillary Clinton's yarn about sniper fire in Tuzla. Apparently, Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos ran out of time before they could ask Obama why he's such a lousy bowler.

It must be said that Obama did not seem very comfortable on the defensive, and he had trouble answering questions like whether he's more patriotic than the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Since "performance" is all that the talking heads ever notice, they'll probably declare Clinton the winner of the debate. She constantly salted Obama's wounds, all the while insisting that she was merely concerned that Republicans would salt them in the fall, and that his various controversies simply "raised questions" about his electability; at one point she claimed that his exhaustively chewed-over relationship with Wright "deserves further exploration," which is kind of like saying that Whitewater deserves further investigation. "These are legitimate questions, as everything is when you run for office," Clinton said.

But maybe Obama is right that Americans are tired of "the kind of manufactured issue that our politics has become obsessed with," as he put in his lapel-pin answer. And even if they aren't, it's nice to hear someone critique that image-obsessed, context-deprived soundbite culture — a culture, incidentally, in which Stephanopoulos flourished when he was spinning for the Clintons.

[...] It's funny, because the intended point of Obama's ill-advised comments about small-town voters was that they "cling" to wedge issues involving God and guns because they've lost faith in our political culture's ability to solve problems. It's an arguable point. But last night suggests that there's little denying that our political culture has lost its ability to illuminate any issue more complicated than the appropriate condiments for a red-blooded American to eat.

-- Michael Grunwald, Time

I propose that everybody associated with the debate at ABC leave journalism and find another job where they can be socially productive--replacing bunnies as animal testing subjects for cosmetics comes to mind as perhaps the best use...

-- Brad DeLong

::

(via Daily Kos)

"Our job is to ask the questions"

Amazingly, unlike just about everyone else on the face of the earth who isn't a Republican or a Clinton supporter, George Stephanopoulos thinks that he and Charles Gibson did a good job moderating last night's debate:

In an interview with me moments ago, Stephanopoulos strongly defended his handling of the debate. He dismissed criticism that it had focused too heavily on "gotcha" questions, arguing that they had gone to the heart of the "electability" that, he said, is forefront in the minds of voters evaluating the two Dems.

"Overall, the questions were tough, fair, relevant, and appropriate," Stephanopoulos argued. And he rejected the claim by many Obama supporters that the debate had been stacked against him, saying Hillary had faced sharp questioning, too.

Tough?  Well, yeah, if you were Barack Obama.  But fair?  The overwhelming majority of the first 45 or so minutes of the debate was spent talking about Obama's perceived gaffes and problems.  Relevant?  Maybe, if you're a beltway insider and the only things you care about are process and gossip.  If you're a middle class worker who is trying to make ends meet because of rising prices, or someone who just got laid off from their job, or the parent or spouse of someone stationed in Iraq, relevant didn't even kick in until almst an hour into the debate, and when it finally did, the questions followed a strictly right-wing, , war-friendly, millionaire-friendly frame.  Appropriate?  The entire debate was one big Republican wet dream come to life.

Today on the campaign trail Obama criticized ABC's handling of the debate, characterizing it as "the roll out of the Republican campaign against me in November."

Asked to respond, Stephanopoulos said that getting criticized "comes with the territory."

"Our job is to ask the questions," he said. "His job is to go out and win votes."

Yes, Stephy, your job is to ask the questions.  As in, ask questions about stuff that actually affects people in their everyday lives.  Ask questions that will inform voters about the issues.  Don't ask questions about trivial, sensationalist garbage that has already been beaten to death by a media that seems to have forgetten that its role is to educate people, not entertain them with gossip and manufactured conflict.  Ask the questions that a journalist would ask, not the questions that a hack form the National Enquirer would.

Asked to defend the fact that policy didn't come up for the first 40 or so minutes of the debate, Stephanopoulos said:

"We decided to focus at the top on the issues that had been at the center of the debate since the last debate. Everything we brought up in that front section had not come up since the last debate. And they all focused on the same theme -- which candidate would be a stronger Democratic candidate in November."

Hadn't come up since the last debate?  Seriously?  Nobody's been talking about Jeremiah Wright for the last several weeks?  And the reason that "issues" like Jeremiah Wright and "bittergate" have been at the center of the the debate is because the media has dropped the ball on its responsibility to talk about stuff that actually matters.  Using your own failure to talk about meaningful issues as an excuse to contiue doing so is intellectually dishonest.

Asked why we should presume that electability, rather than issues, was the dominant concern of many Dems right now, Stephanopoulos argued that it was a frequent topic of discussion on the campaign trail.

So in other words, because process is the topic of choice among the narcissistic, incestuous press corps while they're out on the campaign trail, we as voters should care more about process than about the stuff that affects our everyday lives, like fuel prices.  Wow, talk about being out of touch.

Listening to Georgie's lame attempts to defend what by most objective accounts was a low point in the history of American journalism, I'm left with a picture of someone so insulated from reality by the cocoon of beltway culture that the concerns of everyday people seem totally foreign to him.  His pro-Clinton bias undoubtedly played a role in his poor performance last night, but more prominent in my mind was his complete inability to think about things in terms that someone outside of Washington would.  What's really sad is that the people who are in the best position to hold him accountable are journalists suffering from the same tainted worldview as he does.  Overall, this whole episode paints a very sad picture of the state of American journalism.

What people are saying about last night's debate

The general consensus among people who don't have a vested interest in seeing the Democratic nomination process turn into a trainwreck, and even a few of the ones who do, is that last night's debate was...well, a train wreck:

In perhaps the most embarrassing performance by the media in a major presidential debate in years, ABC News hosts Charles Gibson and George Stephanopolous focused mainly on trivial issues as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama faced off in Philadelphia.

Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the health care and mortgage crises, the overall state of the economy and dozens of other pressing issues had to wait for their few moments in the sun as Obama was pressed to explain his recent "bitter" gaffe and relationship with Rev. Wright (seemingly a dead issue) and not wearing a flag pin while Clinton had to answer again for her Bosnia trip exaggerations.

[...] More time was spent on all of this than segments on getting out of Iraq and keeping people from losing their homes and other key issues. Gibson only got excited when he complained about anyone daring to raise taxes on his capital gains.

Yet neither candidate had the courage to ask the moderators to turn to those far more important issues. But some in the crowd did -- booing Gibson near the end.

To top it off, here is David Brooks' review at The New York Times: "I thought the questions were excellent." He gave ABC an "A."

-- Greg Mitchell at Editor & Publisher

When Barack Obama met Hillary Clinton for another televised Democratic candidates' debate last night, it was more than a step forward in the 2008 presidential election. It was another step downward for network news -- in particular ABC News, which hosted the debate from Philadelphia and whose usually dependable anchors, Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, turned in shoddy, despicable performances.

[...] The fact is, cable networks CNN and MSNBC both did better jobs with earlier candidate debates. Also, neither of those cable networks, if memory serves, rushed to a commercial break just five minutes into the proceedings, after giving each candidate a tiny, token moment to make an opening statement. Cable news is indeed taking over from network news, and merely by being competent.

[...] The boyish Stephanopoulos [...] looked like an overly ambitious intern helping out at a subcommittee hearing, digging through notes for something smart-alecky and slimy. He came up with such tired tripe as a charge that Obama once associated with a nutty bomb-throwing anarchist. That was "40 years ago, when I was 8 years old," Obama said with exasperation.

[...] To this observer, ABC's coverage seemed slanted against Obama. The director cut several times to reaction shots of such Clinton supporters as her daughter, Chelsea, who sat in the audience at the Kimmel Theater in Philly's National Constitution Center. Obama supporters did not get equal screen time, giving the impression that there weren't any in the hall. [...]

At the end, Gibson pompously thanked the candidates -- or was he really patting himself on the back? -- for "what I think has been a fascinating debate." He's entitled to his opinion, but the most fascinating aspect was waiting to see how low he and Stephanopoulos would go, and then being appalled at the answer.

-- Tom Shales, Washington Post

Reflecting what seemed to be the main consensus of the night - that ABC botched this debate, big time - Charlie Gibson tells the crowd there will be one more, superfluous commercial break of the night and is subsequently jeered.

"OH..." he declares, hands raised in defense. "The crowd is turning on me, the crowd is turning on me."

Off camera, observers let out their frustrations.

-- Huffington Post (follow the link for video of fatboy getting booed)

I used to think Republican operative and Karl Rove mentor Lee Atwater had died in 1991, after a nasty career of Republican race baiting, culture wars, dirty tricks, and a illness-induced conversion to Catholicism and public repentance for his dirty and divisive politics.  I was wrong.  Lee Atwater apparently works for ABC News in devising bullshit questions to ask Democratic Presidential candidates. 

The questioning in tonight's debate--—mostly straight out of 1988—was an abomination.  Gun control.  60's radicalism.  Inflammatory black pastors.  Respecting or disrespecting the flag.  Taxes.  Being out of touch with the military.  Affirmative Action.

I'll bet if they had more time, ABC anchors Charles Gibson and George Stephanopolus would probably have gotten around to asking Obama and Clinton about Willie Horton and Piss Christ.

-- DHinMI at Daily Kos

With your performance tonight -- your focus on issues that were at best trivial wastes of valuable airtime and at worst restatements of right-wing falsehoods, punctuated by inane "issue" questions that in no way resembled the real world concerns of American voters -- you disgraced my profession of journalism, and, by association, me and a lot of hard-working colleagues who do still try to ferret out the truth, rather than worry about who can give us the best deal on our capital gains taxes. But it's even worse than that. By so badly botching arguably the most critical debate of such an important election, in a time of both war and economic misery, you disgraced the American voters, and in fact even disgraced democracy itself. [...]

You implied throughout the broadcast that you wanted to reflect the concerns of voters in Pennsylvania. Well, I'm a Pennsylvanian voter, and so are my neighbors and most of my friends and co-workers. You asked virtually nothing that reflected our everyday issues [...].

Instead, you wasted more than half of the debate -- a full hour -- on tabloid trivia that for the most part wasn't even that interesting, because most of it was infertile ground that has already been covered again and again and again. [...]

Here's a question for you, George. Is it true that yesterday you appeared on the radio with conservative talk radio host Sean Hannity, and that you said you were "taking notes" when he urged you to ask a question about Obama's supposed ties to a former member of the Weather Underground -- which in fact you did. With all the fabulous resources of ABC News at your disposal, is that an appropriate way for a supposed journalist to come up with debate questions, by pandering to divisive radio shows?

And Charlie...could you be any more out of touch with your viewers? Most people aren't millionaires like you, and if Pennsylvanians are losing sleep over economic matters, it is not over whether the capital gains tax will go back up again. I was a little shocked when you pressed and pressed on that back-burner issue and left almost no time for high gas prices, but then I learned tonight that you did the same thing in the last debate, that you fretted over that middle-class family that made $200,000 a year. Charlie, the nicest way that I can put this is that you need to get out more.

But I'm not ready to make nice. What I just watched was an outrage. As a journalist, you appeared to confirm all of the worst qualities that cause people to hold our profession in such low esteem, especially your obsession with cornering the candidates with lame "trick" questions and your complete lack of interest or concern about substance -- or about the American people, or the state of our nation. You embarassed some good people who work at ABC News [...] and you embarassed yourselves. The millions of people who watched the debate were embarassed, too -- at the state of our political discourse, and what it has finally become, at long last.

Quickly, a word to any and all of my fellow journalists who happen to read this open letter. This. Must. Stop. Tonight, if possible. I thought that we had hit rock bottom in March 2003, when we failed to ask the tough questions in the run-up to the Iraq war. But this feels even lower. We need to pick ourselves up, right now, and start doing our job -- to take a deep breath and remind ourselves of what voters really need to know, and how we get there, that's it's not all horserace and "gotcha." Although, to be blunt, I would also urge the major candidates in 2012 to agree only to debates that are organized by the League of Women Voters, with citizen moderators and questioners. Because we have proven without a doubt in 2008 that working journalists don't deserve to be the debate "deciders."

Charlie, I'm going to sign off this letter the way that you always sign off the news, that "I hope you had a great day."

Because America just had a horrible night.

-- Will Bunch, Philadelphia Daily News

Aside from the lack of policy questions, so far this "debate" has been played entirely on wingnut ground. If BillO and Sean Hannity hosted it the questions would've been the same.

In a general election debate it would make sense to get questions from the right like that, but in a democratic primary it's just fucking stupid.

-- Atrios

The debate is over, and I feel like I need a shower.

-- Chris Bowers at OpenLeft

Looking around other sites, I guess I'm not the only one that thought this debate was unmitigated travesty. Maybe the embargo on debate rebroadcast was a pro-human rights stand.

-- Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo

The questions were fantastically bad, the candidates didn't really manage to rise above them. Overall, pretty sad.

You know who lost? America.

-- Sam Boyd at TAPPED

Wow. What the hell was that? Seriously, I'm a bit stunned. The level of discourse has reached a new low -- a very new low. To be clear, I don't think the debate was a disaster for Obama. He did fine. I think it was a disaster for our political system.

It was the worst debate ever. Gibson and Stephanopoulos were horrible. The questions were literally right out of right wing talk radio. [...]

And, for Hillary Clinton to get so giddy about the Wright question was really just sad. She was the official purveyor of fringe talking points. Shockingly so. And, she seemed to enjoy it. There's a reason people think Clinton is dishonest as we saw today in the findings of the Washington Post-ABC News poll. She's not only in this to win, she's in it to win dirty -- and to destroy Obama. She invoked Louis Farrakhan tonight for no reason -- just to say it. Give me a break. Throughout this campaign, Clinton has pursued GOP attacks against Obama. He has not gone there against her.

-- Joe Sudbay at AMERICAblog

Throughout the night, ABC returned from commercials with bumpers that featured random quotes from the Constitution, because something, apparently, needed to substitute for gravitas.

Like I said, there have been several thousand of these debates. Most, I've watched. Many, I've covered or liveblogged. A few, I have sat very still, and hoped for the sweet release that only the icy hand of death can provide. Tonight was the first time I would have dearly loved to see Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama team up and turn the tables on their interrogators.

Before ABC signed off for the evening, Gibson heard a reaction from the audience and observed, "The crowd is turning on me."

If only they'd done so sooner.

-- Jason Linkins at The Huffington Post

Well, that was really, really horrible. Charlie Gibson and Mr. Snuffalupagus fed Clinton and Obama nothing but gotcha questions. Torture never came up, China never came up, unchecked executive power never came up, and it was 50+ minutes in before they asked any questions that could be considered remotely substantive or issues-based.

[...] Overall, the moderators were more adversarial towards the candidates than the candidates were towards each other. In fact, they managed to be even worse than Tim Russert and Brian Williams, something I would not have believed possible.

If you're wondering who won the debate (other than McCain), I think it was a wash. Neither candidate outshone the other to an extent that will affect the outcome of the primary. For me the bigger story was the appalling and irresponsible behavior of the moderators. Did they really think that Democratic primary voters are more interested in Weathermen and flag pins than they are in hearing whether their next president thinks authorizing torture is a criminal act?

-- Eli at Firedoglake

How is it that Charlie Gibson is challenging the candidates with reference to a constitutional provision that was overridden by Amendment XII over 200 years ago? I've seen a lot of dumb TV news stunts over the years, but that really takes the cake.

-- Matt Yglesias

I'd forgotten that for months now Charlie Gibson has been asserting that $200,000 is a solid middle-class income, blissfully unaware that just 3.4 percent of U.S. households have an income of $200,000 or more. You could be richer than 96 percent of your fellow citizens, but still just folks to Gibson. Obviously that's not on a par with being bad at bowling or anything on the "out of touch" scale, but it's still disappointing to learn that even our salt of the earth working class multimillionaire television news personalities aren't utterly infallible.

-- Matt Yglesias

The loser was ABC News: one of the worst media performances I can remember - petty, shallow, process-obsessed, trivial where substantive, and utterly divorced from the actual issues that Americans want to talk about. At the end of the debate, it appeared that the crowd was actually heckling Gibson. "The crowd is turning on me!" complained Gibson. He has no idea. But he will soon enough.

-- Andrew Sullivan

So ABC’s debate moderator - Stephanopoulos - goes on Sean Hannity’s radio show, and Hannity essentially hands him opposition research and the ABC “journalist” just repeats it in the course of a presidential debate. Yeah, the media’s liberal.

-- Oliver Willis

My opinions on this are largely irrelevant. What matters to this network is money, and that is where we need to go.  Starting tomorrow, my spare time, meager as it is, will be dedicated to revealing the advertisers of this network, for the purpose of organized boycotts.

-- Dartagnan at Daily Kos

I'm no leftwing blogger, but I can only imagine how furious they must be with the debate so far. Nothing on any issues. Just a lot of box-checking on how the candidates will respond to various Republican talking points come the fall. Now I think a lot of those Republican talking points are valid and legitimate. But if I were a "fighting Dem" who thinks all of these topics are despicable distractions from the "real issues," I would find this debate to be nothing but Republican water-carrying.

-- Jonah Goldberg at The Corner (National Review)

Post-debate analysis

Aside from a throbbing headache, I got nothing out of tonight's debate.  And I imagine that's how most other observers feel.  I wonder how many people actually made it the whole way through without turning the channel, or throwing their television out the window.

The first 50 minutes of the debate had no substance whatsoever, and with a couple of exceptions was pretty much entirely focused on Barack Obama: his "bitter" remarks, his association with Jeremiah Wright, his choice of flag lapel pins, the date that he took to his senior prom...well, okay, they didn't ask about that.  But they might as well have, because it would have been just as illuminating as the rest of the the questions they asked.  It was essentially a non-stop barrage of attacks against Obama.  The heavy hand of Hillary's buddy George Stephanopoulos was obvious during this part of the debate.

The rest of the debate actually dealt with substance, but the questions might as well have been framed by the RNC.  Listening to Charlie Gibson repeat right-wing horseshit about how capital gains tax cuts supposedly increased tax revenue nearly made my head explode, and the fact that he wasn't called out on it by either of the candidates made it even worse.  If you missed this debate, you've lost out on nothing except the bad mood that you might have otherwise gone to bed in.  Consider yourself fortunate.

I'm not liveblogging the debate

...but I'd just like to note that this is probably the worst presidential debate I have ever watched.  We're about 40 minutes into the debate, and the entire focus has been on attacking Obama for meaningless crap like Jeremiah Wright and "bittergate."  No substance whatsoever.  This is a joke.  The days of Peter Jennings and Ted Koppel are long gone now.  ABC News is a shell of what it used to be.

UPDATED: It took us 50 minutes to finally get to a question about Iraq.  Before that, the debate was one long, running attack against Obama, with Charles Gibson, George Stephanopoulos and Hillary tag-teaming him.  Nauseating.

More about the debate tonight

Apparently it's being moderated in part by George Stephanopoulos, who is the ABC News Political Director.  That would be the same ABC News that first broke the Jeremiah Wright story.  You may also remember George Stephanopoulos as a senior political adviser and former communications director for the administration of Bill Clinton, whose wife is one of the candidates participating in tonight's debate.  And it looks like he's also been gameplanning his questions with Sean Hannity and other right-wingers.

Yeah, this could get ugly.  Hopefully Obama is bringing his "A" game tonight.