On Lobbying

Two items I read in two newspapers last week hit upon the same idea, and begged comment from me.

First, from an editorial the August 21 NY Times called “The Hands that Feed Them:”

Here’s something to remember while you watch the presidential conventions. The lush weeklong extravaganzas — staged in the name of ordinary Americans — will be largely paid for by private, unlimited donations from corporations, deep-pocketed donors and (a few) unions that shop 24/7 for privileged government access.

How much cash are we talking about? More than $112 million is expected from private donors — by far the lion’s share of the cost of the two conventions.

So much for changing the way Washington works. The candidates, Senators John McCain and Barack Obama, have been presenting themselves as dedicated reformers of the money-ridden political process — just not for the weeks of freebie conventioneering.

The celebrations in Denver and Minneapolis-St. Paul will be monuments to the way Washington works: crassly, with real politics galvanized by money.

The gimmick is that soft money is still allowed for the conventions because election regulators have ludicrously deemed the host committees to be civic ventures dedicated to boosting the local cities. The fact is: the host committees are run by party heavyweights and fund-raisers who are eager to have the tabs for their celebrations of democracy picked up by fat-cat favor-seekers.

…

If the two presidential candidates really want to prove their reform credentials, they should commit to banning this embarrassing trough of soft money — long before the conventions of 2012.

And from that same day’s Red & Black, by the ever-courageous Zaid Jilani:

In a recent Barack Obama campaign ad, the senator says he will put “the middle class first.” His opponent John McCain has been touring rust belt states assuring us he won’t exhibit “indifference” to the plight of working people.

Unfortunately for those of us who want to believe them, everyone has a price, and corporate America is more than willing to pay.
[and so on.]

It seems to be conventional wisdom among many today (and not just “liberals,” although both of these examples do come from the left) that lobbying by corporations is necessarily a bad thing.

When I visited Jonathan at Princeton last spring, I sat in on a session of his political science class.  The topic that day was “special interests,” and the professor led the class through a discussion of what special interests were, and what function they served.  When it came to lobbying, he asked for examples of lobbying in politics.  All the examples given were things like a large corporation trying to get tax breaks, unions trying to get favorable laws passed, and sensitive-issue groups trying to change the law.

The view most commonly held seems to be that lobbying is only an action that despicable corporations and hot-button issue groups employ to get special treatment from the government, or drastic reform in the laws, all at the expense of the people at large.

To be sure, this does happen, and in these cases, that’s about all it is.  But the mere act of lobbying does not run contrary to our well-being in a democratic society, but is, in fact, good and essential.  No one in Jonathan’s class seemed to think that “lobbying” also encompassed ordinary actions by ordinary citizens: a person writing a letter or calling their congressman, a church group or volunteer group taking a trip to Washington, DC, and meeting with their congressman, and even a $50 campaign donation by an average Joe.  Lobbying is simply the act of trying to influence a policymaker to make a decision favorable to you, and probably almost every interaction with an elected official (or a potential one) counts as this.

When McCain and Obama boast that they have no lobbyists on their campaign staffs, I wonder how they can make that claim straight-facedly, or allow people to reach the conclusion they want to imply through it — that they are not influenced by lobbyists.  A president on whom lobbyists had no bearing would be more like the Leader in V for Vendetta than any kind of figure beholden to his citizens.  He would make his decisions totally regardless of what implications they would have for his people.  No citizen — or, rather, subject — would ever be able to talk to him, he would never make an effort to learn about living conditions in his autocracy, and no .  He would be unreachable, and his decisions would be absolute.

No, lobbying is a part of democracy, and is in fact a defining characteristic of representative democracy.  A candidate who claims to be against lobbying is against that.

Now what if we restrict our use of “lobbying,” as Princeton students and commentators like those above do, to describe only lobbying by major corporations, unions, countries, and hot-button issue groups?  Is that type of lobbying bad?  Should it be banned?

To answer the first question, this type of lobbying is only as bad as any other kind of lobbying.  Perhaps it’s not the lobbying commentators should object to, but the readiness with which politicians sell their votes, especially when it does run against the interests of most people, or against human rights.

To answer the second question, I would ask first “could it be banned?”  If we wanted to ban lobbying by corporations in general, that would preclude lobbying by small businesses and plenty of companies we don’t always think of as the giant soulless vacuums of greed today.

How about cutting off lobbying privileges only to companies of a certain size, or by some other standard?  If we did, I can see no way this would not be a completely arbitrary judgment, different from person to person.

And what if we did do this anyway? Would the outcome be better for the overall population?  I doubt it.  One reason corporations lobby so much is because they are such big targets for legal action, by both private citizens and government regulators.  It’s not their fault that Americans like to sue, and if we were able to reduce this burden on them some other way, they would not need to seek as much protection from within the legal system.

Of course, corporations also lobby for laws more favorable to them.  Sometimes the changes they want would be good for the population overall, sometimes bad (without defining exactly what would fit into each, I hope we can just agree some would be good and some would be bad).  If lobbying by corporations was banned, we would lose out on all the beneficial changes they seek to make their operation costs lower along with all the bad.

But this is not the best solution.  The answer is not to ban the act of lobbying, nor to try to remove the apparatus of private donation to campaigns, to related PACS, or to anything else.  The answer is for people to vote more intelligently, and to hold their leaders more accountable.  Should Chris Dodd, who got special rates from Countrywide in 2003 on two home mortgages, and subsequently sponsored a bill to help the ailing company this past summer, stay in office?  Not if his voters think that amounts to a criminal give-and-take.  Should Ted Stevens have won his primary in Alaska yesterday, as he did, though he’s currently under investigation for taking large gifts from oil companies?  Not if his constituents don’t like how cozy he has been with oil executives.

The problem with the New York Times’ editorial opinion is that it seems to have never considered the option of voting installed politicians out of office, which at the Senate level, scarcely ever happens.  They continue to view crooked pols as the “defenders of the public interest,” and corporations as selfish favor-seekers.  The solution, they contend, is not to kick out politicians who act more in a few corporations’ interests, but to change the system so that our representatives cannot be lobbied.  This is not the solution we want.

Times Challenges Time for Puffiest Obama Story

I hate to keep hitting on this subject, but this is really ridiculous.

Anyone interested (or at least, anyone who thinks the media is playing a fair or unbiased role) would find it a worthy exercise to compare and contrast this NY Times “news” article, published online yesterday, and one the Onion mockingly reported on in Time. I’ll get you started:

The New York Times: Starting in law school, Mr. Obama began pulling together a large cast of mentors, well-connected and civic-minded friends who rose in Chicago and Illinois politics along with him, including a spouse he thought was ideal.
“He loved Michelle,” said Gerald Kellman, Mr. Obama’s community organizing boss, but he was also looking for the kind of partner who could join him in his endeavors. “This is a person who could help him manage the pressures of the life he thought he wanted.”
While he speeds along rope lines, Mr. Obama sometimes connects better one on one. In spare moments, he will surprise supporters — a doorman who scraped together a small contribution, an elderly woman he had heard enjoyed his memoir — with an out-of-the blue phone call. Waiting backstage to speak to 20,000 people in Seattle in February, Mr. Obama grew so absorbed in talking to a retired Michigan couple that he had to be reminded not to miss his entrance cue.

The Onion: The 24-page profile, entitled “Boogyin’ With Barack,” hit newsstands Monday and contains photos of the candidate as a baby, graduating from Columbia University, standing and laughing, holding hands with his wife and best friend, Michelle, greeting a crowd of blue-collar autoworkers, eating breakfast with diner patrons, and staring pensively out of an airplane window while a pen and legal pad rest comfortably on his lowered tray table.
Sherwood said he was granted full access to the candidate, and was permitted by chief strategist David Axelrod to ask any question he desired—an opportunity the reporter used to lob the easiest softballs at Obama yet, ranging from how happy he felt when he met his wife to what songs are currently on his iPod playlist.

The New York Times: Nearly a decade ago, Mr. Obama joined luminaries like George Stephanopoulos and Ralph Reed for regular seminars, organized by Robert Putnam, a professor at Harvard and the author of “Bowling Alone,” about the deterioration of American community ties. As a young state senator from Illinois, Mr. Obama was one of the less prominent members of the group. But soon everyone was referring to him as “the governor” — a friendly smack, said Mr. Putnam, at Mr. Obama’s precocity and drive.
From an early age, Mr. Obama was taught by his mother to think grandly about his potential to help others. Once he reached adulthood, admiring teachers and mentors reinforced the message, steadily directing his sights higher and higher. As a law student, he mused about wanting to be mayor of Chicago; as a law professor, he talked about running for governor of Illinois; not long after that, he was running for president.
“I thought of him much more as a colleague” than a student, said Laurence Tribe, a law professor at Harvard for whom Mr. Obama worked. “I didn’t think of him as someone to send out on mechanical tasks of digging out all the cases.” Other students could do that, Professor Tribe added.
Mr. Obama’s campaign promotes accomplishments from his days in the Illinois Senate: He successfully championed campaign finance and racial profiling laws, as well as child care subsidies and tax credits for the working poor. But “he didn’t participate in rank-and-file things,” said John Corrigan, a former consultant to the State Senate’s Democratic caucus. “He was destined for something bigger than potholes.”

The Onion: “When the American people cast their vote this November, this is the piece of fluff they’re going to remember,” Stengel said. “Not the ones by Newsweek, Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Economist, Nightline, The Wall Street Journal, or even that story about lessons Obama learned from his first-grade teacher we ran a month ago.”
“Situations like these are when you have to get on the phone and talk, not only to his mother, but to his aunt, his uncle, a Boy Scout leader, or maybe even one of his camp counselors growing up,” Sherwood said. “And if they don’t return your call, you turn to Sunday school teachers and former babysitters—anyone who is willing to go on record and say that Barack Obama was a really good kid who was destined for great things.”

The New York Times: These voters are not the first to see a contradiction between Mr. Obama’s aura of specialness and his insistence that he is just like everyone else.
Last month, while visiting Jerusalem, Mr. Obama crammed a note in the Western Wall that was promptly fished out and posted on the Internet. The message was elegantly phrased, as if Mr. Obama, a Christian, had anticipated that his private words to the Almighty would soon be on public display.
In the note, Mr. Obama asked for protection, forgiveness and wisdom, a message in keeping with the humility he tries to emphasize. But his uncanny self-assurance and seemingly smooth glide upward have stoked complaints from his critics and his opponents…

The Onion: Sherwood was also fearless in his effort to paint the candidate as someone who is “surprisingly down to earth,” a phrase that is used a total of 26 times throughout the feature.
The article, which follows Obama for 12 days during his campaign, was written by reporter Chris Sherwood, and is relentless in its attempt to capture the candidate at his most poised and polished. Sherwood said the profile easily trumps all other fluff pieces in its effort to expose the presidential candidate for who he really is: “an awesome guy.”

[Just to be clear: the Onion article, which was published July 18, points out the unabashed fawning coverage Obama gets in the media; the Time article it cites is made up by them. But the NY Times article I quote here is real, and was published yesterday (and I suspect will be found in today's print edition). I guess you could pretty much switch out the Onion's fake quotes for real ones from the Times and have a factual article from the Onion, and still an unreservedly pro-Obama "puff piece" in the NY Times masquerading as news.]

[update, 3:50 pm: The New York Times story did indeed make the print edition, and no less a place than front page, above the fold, with a jump to a full-page story inside.  Disgraceful.]

Dave Barry’s back…

…and I haven’t even been checking! Old DB now has a collection of columns about the Olympics up on his website, and has begun his coverage of the Democratic National Convention. Looks like I’ve got some busy reading days ahead of me.

The DNC’s on, let the drama begin

The Democratic party has gathered in Denver for what will be without question one of the most exciting political conventions in decades.

Granted, this is like saying that Moe was without question one of the smartest Stooges. The political conventions have been pointless and boring for years, culminating in 2004, when MSNBC, during its prime-time coverage of the Republican convention, broadcast 38 straight minutes of Chris Matthews snoring and drooling into his lap. (This got by far the highest ratings.)

But this year will be different. This year there is high drama in the Mile High City as the Democrats gather under their official 2008 convention slogan: “A Unified Party, United in Unity Together As One, Undivided.”

Already there has been sporadic gunfire between the Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton delegates. Political observers see this as indication that there is still some underlying tension between the two sides. Yes, Clinton has been making speeches urging her supporters to work for Obama; but at the same time she has also been using what one Obama adviser described as “a lot of air quotes.”

It’s hard to blame Sen. Clinton for being bitter. Here she is, the smartest human ever, PLUS she spent all those years standing loyally behind Bill Clinton wearing uncomfortable pantyhose (I mean Hillary was, not Bill) (although there are rumors), PLUS she went to the trouble and expense of acquiring a legal residence in New York State so she could be a senator from there, PLUS she assembled a team of nuclear-physicist-grade genius political advisors, PLUS she spent years going around to every dirtbag community in America explaining in detail her 23-point policy solutions for every single problem facing the nation including soybean blight. And after all that, she loses the nomination to a guy who has roughly the same amount of executive governmental experience as Hannah Montana. Hillary is like: “Are you KIDDING me?”

Sen. Clinton is scheduled to address the convention Tuesday night, when she will either call on her supporters to unite behind Obama, or attempt to snatch the nomination and escape with it by helicopter to a secret mountain fortress. ”We are fully confident that Sen. Clinton will do the right thing,” stated a Democratic party official, adding, “but we have a net.”

The Obama-Clinton tension is only one of the dramatic storylines developing in Denver. Another one is Obama’s choice of running mate. Following days of feverish media speculation over a list of names that at one point included the late Hubert Humphrey and a probably fictional congressperson named ”Chet Edwards,” Obama, in a bold move, went with the one name guaranteed to send an electric shock of electricity through the spinal cord of American politics: Joe Biden.

This choice not only virtually locks up Delaware’s electoral vote (which it shares with Wyoming) but it also buttresses the Obama team with one of the Senate’s most vocal voices. Sen. Biden is scheduled to address the convention Wednesday night from 8:48 p.m. until dawn.

But in the end, the focus of this convention will be on Barack Obama, who on Thursday night will receive the nomination in long-overdue recognition of a distinguished career of seeking the nomination. His goal, in his acceptance speech, will be to win over the undecided voters — the people who are unsure of what he really stands for, or who have received emailed rumors that he is a Muslim, or a socialist, or a vampire, or a lesbian. His goal will be to show, with no disrespect to the Muslim socialist vampire lesbian community, that he is a regular person just like you, except he has Vision and Leadership. After that, he will lay out his specific policies for building a brighter future. Then he will turn into a bat.

No, he won’t, although that would make this the most fun convention EVER. But it still promises to be interesting. I’ll be on hand to report all the convention-news developments to you from Denver as I think them up. Then next week I’ll head to Minnesota or possibly Wisconsin and do the same from the Republican convention. Back-to-back party conventions! It’s an exciting time to be a political “junkie.”

Please, shoot me.

thought for the day

From Greg:

“The Libertarian Party should change its name to the Pot Party because that’s the only issue they’re unified on.”

Old-skool style

I’ve got two actual substantive posts on the backburner right now; haven’t had time to write them up since Friday.  For now, though, I have to wonder if CNN’s headline writers have been listening to a lot of Sugarhill Gang lately:

Analysis: Biden gives Obama old-school cred

 

When I think old school, it’s not Joe Biden I think of, it’s this:

Or maybe they just attended a lecture from DMC, as I will be doing this Tuesday night.

and from rcp…

without saying anything about whether i think this is either a serious issue, or even a believable analysis by this writer, is this the next big story on Obama?  If so, lookie, i posted it here first!!!

Okay, that was a dumb entry.

miscellany for today

Looking over drudge right now:

TIME MAG PUTS OBAMA ON COVER -- FOR 7TH TIME IN A YEAR!

[MCCAIN HAS BEEN ON COVER TWICE]

thank you for pointing this out, matt (drudge). apparently Time has not learned from their readers’ letters, which I commented on in an earlier post.  expect any time now for them to change their name to the Obama Weekly.

======

HALLMARK Introduces: Gay marriage cards...

what a cool milestone.  but don’t look for them in georgia.

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California to probe Sen. Schumer over bank run?

did chuck schumer provoke a bank run?  it’s a surprising story: the letter he wrote in june, about the supposed mismanagement of indymac, is now alleged by former executives of that bank to have caused their collapse when it was printed far and wide in the press.  the surprising thing in that story is that it seems he didn’t actually mean to have that letter reported in the media, which is naturally what everyone (me, anyway) assumed.  but copies of it were actually circulated to media by a washington pr firm, one which also helped circulate a 2004 book about how john kerry was a terrible, reckless, arrogant, unpatriotic, cowardly, evil swift boat captain (unfit for command, or something like it).

at any rate, i find it a little hard to believe that a single letter like this caused such a bank run, though i suppose it could have contributed.

=====

as a bonus, while doing some “research” for this post, i wandered far afield into the surreal nether-regions of conservapedia, and found these illuminating gems in the article on “deceit:”

Christianity and Judaism teach that deceit is wrong. For example, the Old Testament says, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.”^[2] Public schools, in contrast, do not teach that deceit is wrong.

Democratic Senator and Presidential candidate Joe Biden is listed on famousplagiarists.com for his widely publicized copying from British liberal Neil Kinnock and then pawning it off as his own, and then initially denying he had done anything wrong. The resultant exposure of his unacknowledged appropriation of Kinnock’s work forced Biden out of the 1988 presidential race,^[10] but liberals have continued to support him as a U.S. Senator and do not seem to mind his prior deceit one bit.

Conducting experiments and claiming their results prove that evolution is real, when in fact, they do not [is an example of deceit].

oh, i see now, so purposeful deception is a part of the liberal doctrine, and liberals are the cause of all the world’s problems through deceit, as well as their other frustrating beliefs and practices, which also include “Calling anyone they agree with a ‘professor’ regardless of whether he earned that distinction based on a real peer review of his work (see, e.g., Richard Dawkins and Barack Obama).”  it’s all so clear now.

The Orwell Diaries

After posting, I did some exploration of wordpress blogs, and came to this site, listed on wordpress’ top posts of the day.  The blog, called “The Orwell Diaries” (or, perhaps, “The Orwell Prize”), endeavors to post entries from the diary of George Orwell dated from 1938 to 1942, as he watched Europe descend into World War II.  Each entry will be posted 70 years to the day from when it was written, so that readers can in a way relive the experience, seeing it through Orwell’s eyes.  The first entry comes today (yesterday, technically), recounting a not-so-ominous occurrence at Orwell’s house:

Caught a large snake in the herbaceous border beside the drive. About 2’ 6” long, grey colour, black markings on belly but none on back except, on the neck, a mark resembling an arrow head (ñ) all down the back. Did not care to handle it too recklessly, so only picked it up by extreme tip of tail. Held thus it could nearly turn far enough to bite my hand, but not quite. Marx¹ interested at first, but after smelling it was frightened & ran away. The people here normally kill all snakes. As usual, the tongue referred to as “fangs”².

“So far, so sordid”

The typical sex scandal of an also-ran these days hardly merits comment, but John Edwards’ recently revealed steppin’ around has more import than others might. Just to fill readers in, the National Enquirer recently reported following Edwards to a meeting with his mistress at the Beverly Hills Hilton, cornering him as he left, and chasing him into a bathroom where he blocked the door from the inside until hotel security came and took the journalists away.

I first heard of it a couple of weeks ago on drudge. It was just a scummy story from the National Enquirer, and even after reading it, I was inclined to dismiss it because I looked in several places, and they were the only paper reporting this. No “reputable” source even mentioned it to say it was untrue.

Finally, this past week, Edwards confessed that the Enquirer story was (partially) true: he’d had an affair with a campaign worker in 2006, and says he ended it then. (Though he’s admitted to that, a few other messy details remain unexplained: the woman now has a baby whose father is unknown–the birth certificate does not give a name. Edwards denies being the father of the child, and one of his campaign workers in fact came forward claiming to be the father, but even though Edwards says he’d submit to a paternity test, the woman is apparently not allowing it. Even if this version of the story is true–a campaign love triangle producing a child with an unknown father–it’s not nice, and it doesn’t fully make sense. The only way his claim could be true is if both Edwards and the other guy were sleeping with her at the same time, which means the only way he could be sure he wasn’t the father was to take a paternity test, so how does he know he’s not the father? Just sounds like a Maury episode waiting to happen.)

Tim Rutten from the Los Angeles Times, however, has a good column on why this story actually matters.

But what’s really significant here is the cone of silence the nation’s major newspapers — including The Times — and the cable and broadcast networks dropped over this story when it first appeared in the tabloid during the presidential primary campaign.

…

As pressure mounted on major newspapers to take some aspect of the unfolding scandal into account, editors and ombudsmen issued statements saying it would be unfair to publish anything until the Enquirer’s stories had been “confirmed.”

Well, there’s confirming and then there’s confirming. One sort occurs when an editor mutters, “Find somebody and have them make a few calls.” Then there’s the sort that comes when that editor summons an investigative reporter with a heart like ice and a mind like Torquemada’s and says, “Follow this wherever it goes and peel this guy like an onion.”

Suffice to say that the follow-up of the Enquirer’s story fell into the former category in too many newsrooms, including that of The Times.

…

It’s interesting that what finally forced Edwards into telling the truth was a mainstream media organization. ABC News began investigating the Edwards affair in October, but really began to push after the Beverly Hilton allegations. When ABC confronted Edwards with its story (which confirmed “95% to 96%” of the tabloid’s reporting, according to the network), he admitted his deception.

With that admission, the illusion that traditional print and broadcast news organizations can establish the limits of acceptable political journalism joined the passenger pigeon on the roster of extinct Americana.

The problematic aspect of this whole scandal is not so much that Edwards had an affair and lied, but that the entire mainstream media seemingly deliberately (to my mind) tried to stamp it out by denying it coverage. Indeed, the media “blackout” had that effect when I first saw the story: as I said, when only the Enquirer was reporting it, it was dubious.

Dan Rather once defined “news” as “anything that someone somewhere doesn’t want you to know.” Edwards’ extramarital relations themselves aren’t that big of a deal–people mess around all the time, and it doesn’t make headlines. What makes it news is that Edwards, like all politicians, seeks to cultivate an image of honesty and strong family values, which this story obviously deflates. What makes this story most discouraging is how the mainstream media outlets resisted so strongly in doing their jobs and investigating/reporting this very big news.

edit: for the Enquirer’s take on Edwards’ shocking admission, click here. A little different spin, there.