Welcome to the 2016 Piranha Tank, Republican Presidential Candidates
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Morning Jolt February 23, 2015 Welcome to the 2016 Piranha Tank, Republican Presidential Candidates Meet the press. Remember that Atlantic piece on the Islamic State that everyone raved about, and that is really changing the way people think about that Islamist terrorist group? Graeme Wood put tons of work into it. He completed lots of interviews with some particularly unsavory characters, which must have taken a lot of negotiation. Enormous amounts of research. The lengthy article walks through some complicated concepts and a lot of history and geography. Journalism work like that is hard. It requires a really good reporter/writer/researcher/thinker, good editors, and a publication willing to be patient. Not everybody is that good. Not every editor is that good, and not every publication can afford to be that patient. No, the simplest and easiest news story that can create a stir, get web traffic and attention, is the "can you believe this guy said this?" story. (Lord knows, I've written my share of them.) And just about any Republican at any level, in office or out of office, is fair game for a national "can you believe this guy said this?" story. (Dave Weigel identifies the "Republican lawmaker" story trend here, where controversial comments from little-known, usually-powerless GOP state legislators become national news.) A news piece, a column, a television segment, or a radio riff on the questions, "Does Barack Obama love his country, yes or no?"; "Is Barack Obama a Christian, yes or no?" -- Man, that's easy! It's like playing lineman -- you just take a side and start hitting people. It helps to know a bit about Obama, but the question is basically a stand-in for "Do you like President Obama or not?" If you don't like him, you find it quite plausible that he doesn't really love the country as it is, or you find his claims of Christian faith phony and unconvincing. If you like him, then asking the question is a de facto slur. Ask those questions, and watch the comments sections burst into flame. The phone lines at the radio stations are sure to light up. And for the mainstream media, those questions to a candidate -- "Does Barack Obama love his country?" "Is he a Christian?" the easiest way to force a political figure – like a Republican presidential candidate -- to create news. We're seeing furious columns about Giuliani's comment -- and Scott Walker's refusal to disavow Giuliani -- from Mike Barnicle, Charles Blow, Mika Brzezinski declaring "It's not hard to be human," and so on. And this is a seven-day-old story. Republicans should be considerably concerned by this media environment; the press is desperately hungry for material to reinforce the Republicans-as-villains storyline, and will do anything they can to turn an uttered word into a seven-day story. There has been no shortage of news coverage—and criticism—regarding comments I made about President Obama at a political gathering last week in New York. My blunt language suggesting that the president doesn't love America notwithstanding, I didn't intend to question President Obama's motives or the content of his heart. My intended focus really was the effect his words and his actions have on the morale of the country, and how that effect may damage his performance.
Is America Still Great? Friday afternoon, Ace of Ace of Spades and I had an usually strong disagreement about the current condition of the United States of America. He admits he doesn't feel as patriotic as he used to feel, and that in fact he's "grown contemptuous" of America. He laments, "the average American craves Obama's brand of stupid, obvious lies. They're lies for the lazy. And we have grown so, so lazy." As his Tweets declared . . . Look, this is a dumb country. We have a $18 trillion debt and all it took was for Obama to say "I don't feel like dealing with that" and the dumb dummies of New Dumbland said "yeah i don't feel like dealing with that either, let's watch American Idol." The average American still believes that we could balance the budget if we just cut foreign aid. It doesn't matter how many times you tell him that's not true, or point him to the numbers. Let me preface my counter-argument by saying Ace is an analytical and comedic genius. And his description of "the dumb dummies of New Dumbland" undoubtedly applies to a certain segment of our fellow citizens. I don't deny that the "dumb dummies of New Dumbland" exist, only that they're not as representative of the country as a whole as Ace fears. There's a lot of America out there that never gets any coverage, isn't on social media, and is still great in so many ways. The one-two punch of mass media and social media give us a particularly skewed perspective of our fellow citizens. Many of us have laughed and gasped at Jay Leno's old "Jaywalking" segments, where Los Angelenos struggled to identify the current vice president, and didn't even know that they should know it. Polling regularly offers terrifying indicators of public ignorance, such as 44 percent of Americans being unable to define the Bill of Rights. Facebook, Twitter, and other social media offer a daily spotlight on idiots who know astonishingly little, including how little they know. Social media and mass media practically run on tales of stupid criminal behavior. The Twitter account "Florida Man" offers every oddball crime story with the headline featuring a perpetrator with that infamous identifier. Americans think that the violent-crime rate has gone up in the past two decades, when in fact the violent-crime rate has been cut in half since the early 1990s. A wise man, describing the seas that political bloggers swim in, once told me, "There's the Internet, which attracts a certain demographic of crazy people. And then there's the world of politics, which attracts another demographic of crazy people. And those of us who write about politics on the Internet are right in the middle of that Venn Diagram of crazy people." That man who told me that? Ace of Spades. What you see spotlighted in social and mass media are not representative of the character of the country as a whole. For starters, we are an unbelievably generous people:
Our volunteerism rate is down, but that's still quite a few among us: "About 62.6 million people volunteered through or for an organization at least once between September 2012 and September 2013. The volunteer rate in 2013 was the lowest it has been since the supplement was first administered in 2002." On Twitter Friday, I mentioned all the places you can find lots of examples of not-so-dumb America: Veterans of Foreign Wars halls, PTA meetings, the National Rifle Association annual meeting, churches, synagogues, temples, Little League fields, high-school musical performances. Heck, head out to the local farmer's market, and you'll find small entrepreneurs who love their product and are warm and welcoming and not the least bit upset when my sons stick their grubby germ-laden hands into the sample basket. I'm sure you can think of other examples. I suspect those places make for a revitalizing antidote to the ugly portrait of America you find in media and from the loudest mouths on social media. I completely understand why conservatives might look at a country that reelects President Obama and feel shaken. But if you really believe that things are too far gone, that we're approaching Mike Judge's Idiocracy, that Americans are ignorant, shallow, materialistic, lazy and dishonorable . . . well, for starters, you don't sound all that different from those arrogant, snobbish liberal elites you've been denouncing. Secondly, you're starting to argue that this place isn't worth saving. Minimum-Wage Hikes: A Great Incentive to Advance Automation Technology! Go on over to Mike Rowe's site and read his short essay on the minimum wage. The whole thing is brilliant, and is precisely the tone a presidential candidate needs to use: I thought about all this last month when I saw "Boyhood" at a theater in San Francisco. I bought the tickets from a machine that took my credit card and spit out a piece of paper with a bar code on it. I walked inside, and fed the paper into another machine, which beeped twice, welcomed me in mechanical voice, and lowered a steel bar that let me into the lobby. No usher, no cashier. I found the concession stand and bought a bushel of popcorn from another machine, and a gallon of Diet Coke that I poured myself. On the way out, I saw an actual employee, who turned out to be the manager. I asked him how much a projectionist was making these days, and he just laughed. "There's no such position," he said. "I just put the film in the slot myself and press a button. Easy breezy." To answer your question Darrell, I'm worried. From the business owners I've talked to, it seems clear that companies are responding to rising labor costs by embracing automation faster than ever. That's eliminating thousands of low-paying, unskilled, entry level positions. What will that mean for those people trying to get started in the workforce? My job as an usher was the first rung on a long ladder of work that lead me to where I am today. But what if that rung wasn't there? If the minimum wage in 1979 had been suddenly raised from $2.90 to $10 an hour, thousands of people would have applied for the same job. What chance would I have had, being seventeen years old with pimples and a big adams apple? . . . I'm also skeptical that a modest pay increase will make an unskilled worker less reliant upon an employer whom they affirmatively resent. I explained this to Jobs With Justice in an open letter, and invited anyone who felt mistreated to explore the many training opportunities and scholarships available through mikeroweWORKS. I further explained that I couldn't join them in their fight against "bad jobs," because frankly, I don't believe there is such a thing. My exact words were, "Some jobs pay better, some jobs smell better, and some jobs have no business being treated like careers. But work is never the enemy, regardless of the wage. Because somewhere between the job and the paycheck, there's still a thing called opportunity, and that's what people need to pursue." People are always surprised to learn that many of the subjects on Dirty Jobs were millionaires -- entrepreneurs who crawled through a river of crap, prospered, and created jobs for others along the way. Men and women who started with nothing and built a going concern out of the dirt. I was talking last week with my old friend Richard, who owns a small but prosperous construction company in California. Richard still hangs drywall and sheet rock with his aging crew because he can't find enough young people who want to learn the construction trades. Today, he'll pay $40 an hour for a reliable welder, but more often than not, he can't find one. Whenever I talk to Richard, and consider the number of millennials within 50 square miles of his office stocking shelves or slinging hash for the minimum wage, I can only shake my head. PS: I looked into the Freedom Socialist Party and their demand for a universal, $20 an hour living wage. Interesting. You're right – they're serious. But not long after they announced their position, they made the interesting decision to advertise for a web designer . . . at $13 an hour. Make of that what you will. ADDENDA: A detail of Washington in Mike Allen's newsletter: "Tom Nides, the Morgan Stanley executive who was expected to land a top job in Hillary Clinton's campaign, will stay on the outside, Democratic sources tell Playbook . . He is married to Virginia Moseley, CNN vice president and deputy Washington bureau chief." What an epically blah Oscars. The snub of American Sniper is disappointing, but not surprising. Not hearing the winners for Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Picture by 11:30 p.m. Eastern time is surprising. Eddie Redmayne, who played Dr. Stephen Hawking, won best actor; Julianne Moore won best actress for Still Alice, and Birdman won Best Picture. Credit Michael Keaton for his personal approach in the film's publicity effort:
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