Time columnist Joe Klein jumped to Newt Gingrich's defense (12/19/11) when the Republican presidential candidate floated the idea that poor school children should work as janitors at their schools. Klein's endorsement (FAIR Blog, 12/9/11) earned him a coveted P.U. Litzer Prize. But apparently there's more to it.

As Klein explains in this week's issue of Time (in an article that bears a title "Racial Slant Aside, Newt's Poverty Plan Could Work"), "When you strip away the racial appeals, though, Gingrich proposes some very creative ways to address poverty and dependency."

He added:

And yes, as Newt suggested, that last idea did come from me--although I put a slightly different twist on it.

I first made the suggestion in 1991, after the New York City janitors negotiated a gaudy contract that required them to mop the cafeteria floor only once a week.

The difference, apparently, is that Klein wanted to see "students and their parents help keep the schools clean," and "not just poor students--all students, even those attending the city's elite high schools. It was a form of public service, intended to build a sense of responsibility and community in students of every income level."

Well, at least Gingrich was going to pay the kids.

How about expanding the idea further, though: Why not let high school students take turns writing a column for a national news magazine? It'd be a nice form of public service. And consider the benefit to Time readers.

We've been seeing a lot of this sort of thing lately--this time from Elizabeth Wurtzel on TheAtlantic.com (1/9/12):

All the reasons Romney is disliked are all the reasons he would be an excellent president. Let's start by recognizing that principled politicians are highly overrated--consider Jimmy Carter as Exhibit A. Despite our pretensions to pretension, we are not a country that loves ideology--we're not, heaven forbid, France--so much as we are a can-do people that, after all, last elected a yes-we-can president. We like what works, not what it says in The Communist Manifesto, which reads like a guidebook for a republic of dreams, and of course ends in a Stalinist bloodbath. Romney's, shall we say, flexibility (I refuse to use the word that refers to summer footwear) with his positions on abortion and just about everything else that makes the weasel go pop just shows that he is responsive to his constituents' desires. When they were a pro-choice crowd, that's where he stood, and when he fell in with the right-wing lunatics, he learned to speak in tongues. I think giving the people what they want is what we want.

This echoes Ann Gerhart in the Washington Post (12/11/11):

And in service of these goals, Romney's flip-floppery could be interpreted as a flexibility of thinking that might help him bust through warring ideologies in Washington--an asset, not a deficit--and fix his biggest set of problems yet.

And Frank Bruni in the New York Times (1/2/12):

But what if his doubters, his nemeses and many of us pondering the protean wonder of him have it all wrong? What if changeability is his strength? Someone not fixed in a single place can pivot to more advantageous ones. A vessel partly empty has room for the beverage du jour. And Romney is ready to be filled with whatever's most nutritive....

In the primaries, that’s a liability, and Santorum, with his ideological rigidity, could haunt Romney for a while. But if Romney nabs the nomination, his malleability may be an asset, allowing Obama-soured voters to talk themselves into him. After all, a creature without passionate conviction doesn’t cling to extremes.

Later in the Times, Helene Cooper and Mark Landler (1/5/12) warned the Obama campaign to avoid attacking Romney as a political shapeshifter, again depicting that as one of the Republican's hidden strengths:

Independent voters might view Mr. Romney's shifting positions as pragmatic. And by highlighting his evolving views, political analysts say, the Obama campaign risks unintentionally promoting the image of Mr. Romney as a moderate.

The very things that have made Mr. Romney less palatable to the conservatives who populate the Republican primaries and caucuses--his past moderate positions--are what make him more palatable to the independent voters who will turn up next November.

Note that this is not the way that media pundits talk about Democratic primary candidates when they attempt to make ideological appeals to their party's base. (See Extra!, 7-8/06, for some good examples of this.) In media mythology, Democrats win when they attack their base--trying to appeal to them makes them seem "craven, weak and untrustworthy," in Joe Klein's words (Time, 9/25/05).

Why are Democrats and Republicans seen so differently? Well, the Democratic base likes it when you make populist economic appeals--that is, when you point out that the sort of people who own the media have too much wealth and power. From the corporate media perspective, that's not clever, that's dangerous.

Appealing to the Republican right, on the other hand, generally involves a little harmless racebaiting and god-bothering. Media pundits are confident (probably overly confident) that when the election is over, Romney will go back to the technocratic champion of moderate austerity and defender of corporate profits who they believe him to be at heart. And that's the kind of candidate who appeals to the media's base.

UPDATE: See Peter Hart's post "Pundits and the Romney Pass" (1/10/12) for more on this phenomenon.

We know by now that Newt Gingrich thinks he's smart. And we know there are plenty of people in the corporate media who believe the same thing.  How do they show their love for the brainy Republican presidential candidate? Time's Joe Klein shows the way in this week's issue (12/19/11) of the magazine. He doesn't think Gingrich should be president, but he does think Gingrich is full of interesting ideas.

Well, what about that plan to have kids work as janitors cleaning their schools? Klein's problem with it is that it doesn't go far enough:

I've known him for 25 years. I've had more creative policy conversations with him than with any other elected politician (with the possible exception of Bill Clinton). He is one Republican who is legitimately interested in improving the lives of the poor--although his ideas, which almost always involve market incentives, are quite different from the suffocating paternalism that many Democrats favored until Clinton came along. As early as 1990, Gingrich was paying poor children in Atlanta $2 for every book they read. He also proposed paying foreign-language-speaking students to tutor their English-speaking classmates in their native languages. He also proposed giving every literate child in the poorest neighborhoods a laptop. His recent idea of paying poor kids to help clean their schools--which has been the subject of a shrill, silly gust of liberal ire--is more of the same. It's a good idea, which would be much better if it were expanded to all public middle and high schools, with the work seen as an unpaid form of public service, a way to build community spirit and teach civic responsibility.

It calls to mind Paul Krugman's line about Gingrich--that he's "a stupid man's idea of what a smart person sounds like."

The story of Michele Bachmann's surging campaign momentum continues, this time courtesy of Beltway reporter Mark Halperin of Time magazine:

Why has Michele Bachmann suddenly become the It candidate?

With her impressive New Hampshire debate performance, Bachmann has gone from a conservative Sarah Palin-lite curiosity to a potential game changer. For two hours onstage with her GOP rivals, Bachmann appeared polished, serene and in command. Her smooth performance was partly the work of a top-shelf team of veteran advisers (manager Ed Rollins, pollster Ed Goeas, forensic coach Brett O’Donnell). They sanded down some of her rough edges but let Bachmann be Bachmann, complete with zinging anti-Obama applause lines and sunny-side-up conservatism.

Halperin gave some advice on what Bachmann needed to do to keep things going:

Most of all: avoid the kinds of gaffes, misstatements, self-promotional moments and wacky behavior that would cause the media and many traditional Republicans to--once again--write her off.

Huh. Remember that this was a debate where her economic plan boiled down to calling for certain government agencies to be abolished-- especially the Environmental Protection Agency, which she called the "Job Killing Organization of America." That didn't cause the media to write her off--or most voters, either, since they mostly didn't hear about it.

Or when she said:

The Congressional Budget Office has said that Obamacare will kill 800,000 jobs. What could the president be thinking by passing a bill like this, knowing full well it will kill 800,000 jobs?

This is, as you might expect, not true. But maybe it qualifies as "sunny-side-up conservatism."

It's not just Halperin, though. Time columnist Joe Klein writes:

Bachmann is often linked with Palin as a Tea Party pinup, but she is a different breed of cat: She knows her stuff. She actually gives factual, informed answers. She lacks Palin's bitter, solipsistic edge. She skillfully framed even her most extreme responses in an amenable way, smothering her opposition to abortion in cases of rape and incest within a paean to the sanctity of life.

If you scan the debate transcript, Bachmann didn't give many factual answers to any of the questions. (This is probably not all that unusual in a debate.)  When she tried to--see above about the 800,000 lost jobs--her "fact" was totally inaccurate. As has been the pattern in the past with her--like when she claimed on CBS there was a study showing 30 percent of doctors were leaving the field due to the healthcare law. There is no such study. CBS viewers didn't know the truth, and it seems like journalists are unwilling to tell people that Michele Bachmann's not telling the truth.

There's a long tradition of U.S. pundits wishing for the day Palestinians finally decide to use non-violent means to protest Israeli occupation. Time magazine's Joe Klein weighs in on the subject this week:

Ever since Israel won control of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, the Palestinian national movement has been defined by terrorism, intransigence and, until recently in the West Bank, corruption. It has never been known for dramatic acts of nonviolence. "If they'd been led by Gandhi rather than Yasser Arafat, they would have had a state 20 years ago," Kenneth Pollack of the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution told me. Israeli officials acknowledge that the recent, peaceful economic and security reforms led by Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad have been the most effective tactics the Palestinians have ever used in trying to create a state.

Of course what Palestinians are "known for" or how they are defined might not always resemble what they're actually doing.  There is a long tradition of Palestinian nonviolent resistance. There has rarely been, however, much U.S. media coverage of those acts--which means that, every so often, someone will urge Palestinians to consider behavior they've been practicing for years, or treat nonviolence as if it were a striking new development in the conflict--as the New York Times did last year.

Klein writes:

The young activists may be preoccupied by the chimera of Palestinian unity at the moment, but what happens if they turn their full attention to the Israeli occupation? What happens if they begin to organize marches to protest the near daily outrages perpetrated by Jewish settlers? What if they stage sit-down strikes to open roads that are used by settlers but closed to Palestinians? What if they march 10,000 strong against a settlement that is refusing Palestinians access to a traditional water supply? "If it is nonviolent, then that means, by definition, it is civilized," an Israeli official said. "We have no problem with that." But what if the Palestinians are nonviolent and the Jewish settlers are not? "I think about the dogs unleashed on Martin Luther King in Birmingham," Quran says. "I think about the beatings. That's what it took for Americans to see the justice of his cause. We will be risking our lives, but that is what it takes. I only hope that we're not too well-educated to be courageous."

It would be more helpful to point out that these things have happened regularly for many years.

The Charlie Rose show--which airs mostly on public television stations--has mostly skipped the protests in Wisconsin, one of the biggest labor stories of the past decade. This is not a total surprise--Rose seems to identify with The Bosses more than with the workers--so it was interesting to see how he finally approached the subject on his March 2 show.

The first guest was Time's  Joe Klein. He seems to identify with public sector workers, he knows they're not getting rich, but he doesn't like their unions: "Public employees' unions are a pretty questionable proposition," as he put it. The solution in Wisconsin is "to bring those pension plans and healthcare more in line with the rest of the public."

The next guest: far right Fox News host Mike Huckabee. He makes some jokes about raising the retirement age, then zeroes in on the pension problem:

So what I think the governor in Wisconsin is doing is what he has to do.  A teacher in Wisconsin puts in $1 for the retirement fund.  The fund puts in $57.  I don't know too much people who have a retirement plan.

That would be a remarkably lopsided pension plan. Where does that number come from? There seems to be little trace of it in the debate over Wisconsin. Some commenters at the right-wing Free Republic message board caught Huckabee's appearance and were excited to have a new anti-teacher talking point--only no one could seem to scare up data to support his claim.

General information about contribution rates for Wisconsin teachers can be found here--and you see nothing at all that would resemble Huckabee's formulation. And the Wisconsin pension system is relatively healthy, for the record--making this an odd focus of concern to begin with.

More importantly--what did Charlie Rose do when a guest made such a remarkable claim? He backed him up:

There is it seems to me a huge anger over the fact that people in the private sector see people in the public sector being able to retire with extraordinary benefits because they opt out at age 65.

People are outraged by public employees retiring at 65 with cushy benefits? This is not at all supported by recent polling data. You know what would help clarify things? Rose could consider an on-air clarification or correction. (Huckabee's been doing a lot of "misspeaking" as of late.)  Or he could challenge guests when they make such bizarre claims.

Or--here's an idea!--when the biggest labor story in some time is dominating the news, how about having some labor guests on the show?

Sometimes words fail. Joe Klein, writing in the new issue of Time, wonders:

How on earth do we get saddled with such creepy clients as Karzai and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, over and over again?

Yes, why do they keep doing this to us?!

His piece is a pox-on-both-houses rant about U.S. foreign policy: The "realists" often end up coddling dictators, and the idealists don't understand how the world works. Of the latter, he writes:

the tangible fruits of the Freedom Agenda turned out to be mostly rotten: elections in the Palestinian territories, which no one but Hamas (and Bush) wanted, produced a Hamas plurality; a push for democracy in Afghanistan produced a foolish constitution, centralizing power in a notoriously decentralized country, and corrupt elections. And the jury is still out on Iraq, where the most vital "democratic" force may turn out to be the populist, Iran-leaning cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

If this is supposed to represent some special category of policy wisdom, it fails miserably--it's a fairly standard complaint among pundits that democracy that produces the wrong results (for us) is bad democracy. Klein has a better idea:

A smarter foreign policy would quietly promote a careful transition from autocracy to something more benign. The best way to do this is to latch onto institutions, not individual leaders, in the developing countries we seek as allies.

That institution? The military.

Appearing on CNN's Reliable Sources (1/10/11), Time's Joe  Klein denounced the "crap"  on the Fox News Channel. And as many pundits are prone to do, he found the need to balance that by citing a comparable example from the "other" side:

Well, that brings me to point number two.... Cable news chooses not to really deal with complicated issues with the level of complexity that they deserve. I was on Ed Schultz's show to discuss Afghanistan. I was just back from there. It is the most complicated issue imaginable.

And the guy writes on a piece of paper, "Get out now," and holds it up on the screen. That's so stupid and it's so unworthy.

That's right--a TV host expressing the viewpoint held by approximately half the public is "stupid and unworthy"--and comparable to the murder fantasies peddled by Fox.

Rethink Afghanistan has a video response to Klein's remarks that is worth checking out.

If a single foreign national is rounded up and put in jail because of a leaked cable, this entire, anarchic exercise in "freedom" stands as a human disaster. Assange is a criminal. He's the one who should be in jail.
--Joe Klein, Swampland (12/1/10)

Actually, Julian Assange didn't leak anything--he can't, because he didn't have access to classified documents. Someone (or someones) who did have such access leaked those documents to Assange's WikiLeaks, which, as a journalistic organization, made them available to the world, both directly and through other media partners.

This distinction, which is widely ignored in commentary on WikiLeaks, is actually quite important, because the ethical obligations of a government official with a security clearance are quite different from those of a media outlet. An official makes a promise to protect classified information, and should break that promise only when the duty to keep one's promises is outweighed by the public interest in disclosing wrongdoing. Journalists, on the other hand, are not in the business of protecting secrets, and should have a general presumption in favor of informing the public unless disclosure would cause specific foreseeable harms. The two ethical situations are pretty much opposite.

To treat Assange as a leaker when he is, in fact, a journalist is not only morally confusing, it's quite dangerous to journalists in general. If the government can declare Assange to be spy or a terrorist because he's published classified documents he's received, every investigative journalist who does the same thing is in deep trouble.

The conventional wisdom among corporate pundits has long been that Democrats have to move to the right in order to win. You're likely to hear a lot of this after Tuesday, but there's already plenty of advice being offered in advance of the Democrats' likely midterm defeat.

Time's Joe Klein has his take in the new issue of the magazine (11/8/10). He writes that "with the prospect of a Congress tilted toward the right, Obama will have to figure out new ways to sell his wares, if he can sell them at all." Klein urges Obama to think big--and to think nuclear:

If Obama wants to get a major stimulus program through the next Congress, he should propose the National Defense Nuclear Power Act. And make it big: a plan to blast past the current financing and licensing quagmires and break ground on 25 new nuclear plants between now and 2015.

Klein adds:

Some environmentalists still see nuclear power as unclean, though their argument has been wilting over time as France and Japan, among others, have proved the safety and efficacy of such power and climate change has emerged as our most pressing environmental problem. There will be those who argue, correctly, that given the current abundance of natural gas, nuclear power is too expensive--but it won't be in the future, and the price can be dramatically reduced if the government provides direct, no-interest construction loans rather than loan guarantees.

It's worth recalling that Obama has already made one substantial step in the pro-nuclear direction this year, providing billions in loan guarantees for a new nuclear plant in Georgia  (a move some in the media embraced).

The objection from anti-nuclear environmentalists is not that it's merely "unclean"--though that is a serious concern.  Despite massive amounts of government assistance, the industry hasn't convinced Wall Street investors that nuclear power is a profitable business. Klein's answer seems to be more corporate welfare to prop up an industry already long dependent on substantial government support.

It goes without saying that the progressive base of the Democratic party is where you're most likely to find opposition to nuclear power--which is probably a big part of what makes calling for Obama to embrace it seem so appealing to bash-your-base pundits like Joe Klein.

This past Sunday's edition of NBC's Meet the Press (10/10/10)  featured two guests talking about the midterms, the economy and public sentiment: conservative Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan and Time magazine's Joe Klein.

Klein has been on a road trip through the middle of the country to assess how Americans are feeling (that is, Americans who don't live in "urban" areas or the "deep South," as Klein explained).

Trying to explain how voters feel about Washington, Klein provided this anecdote:

They have no idea what the Democrats stand for, except for these big, slovenly pieces of legislation that we've seen which inevitably contain ridiculous provisions.  One candidate in Nevada, a Republican running for Congress, said that there's a provision in the healthcare reform bill that small businesses have to set aside areas for breastfeeding women to use their breast pumps.  My dad was a small businessman.  He didn't need to be told by the government to do that... He would have just said, "Use my office."

The idea that businesses easily accommodate working mothers will likely come as a surprise to working mothers--most of whom would probably disagree with the idea that a dedicated place to express breast milk is a "ridiculous provision" in the healthcare law.

Perhaps working mothers should all work for someone like Joe Klein's father. Since that's not possible, then maybe laws to protect such workers are necessary after all.

And for the record, there does not appear to be anything in the law that is directed primarily at "small businesses." If anything, such employers (those with fewer than 50 employees) would seem to be eligible for a "undue hardship" exemption.

One thing to add about coverage of Gaza's' rockets is the popularity of the phrase "thousands of rockets." To cite one of many examples, Joe Klein writes for Time (6/9/10):

There is reason to treat Hamas as an enemy of Israel; thousands of rockets fired at Israeli civilians attest to that.

If you described the threat of rockets from Gaza in terms of lives lost, it would sound much less impressive: Rockets fired from Gaza have killed some 16 people in Israel, going back to 2001. It's difficult to present that as a legitimate rationale for killing more than 3,000 Gazan civilians over the same time period.

If you describe the problem in terms of rockets launched, though, it sounds much more serious.  Who wouldn't take extreme action to stop thousands of potentially deadly attacks?

The problem is, if you're going to describe Palestinian attacks on Israel that way, shouldn't you describe Israeli attacks on Gaza the same way?  How many bombs and bullets do you have to drop or fire before you kill 3,000 civilians?  Surely some enterprising reporter with good sources in the Israeli military could make a credible ballpark estimate of the amount of ordnance used by Israel on Gaza, and then stories discussing the conflict could include a line like, "Israel, which has fired millions of rounds of ammunition into Gaza...."  Or however many the total turns out to be.

Until they have that figure, however, perhaps journalists could stick to giving the number of lives lost on each side as a means of conveying the degree of threat each faces.

Time's Joe Klein wrote on his magazine's Swampland blog (1/25/10) that the American public doesn't understand that the economy benefited from the Obama administration's stimulus efforts. So far, so good--it's true that economists generally feel that the stimulus bill had some impact in curbing unemployment, saving about 1.2 million jobs, according to one survey of the profession (USA Today, 1/25/10). The CBO had a similar estimate of stimulus effects (Bloomberg, 12/1/09).

Where Klein goes wrong is blaming the public's lack of understanding of the impact of the stimulus on the public's stupidity. The post, headlined "Too Dumb to Thrive,"  notes that "it is impossible to be a citizen if you don't make an effort to understand the most basic activities of your government," and concludes by suggesting that the United States has become "a nation of dodos." Klein also blames the Obama administration, which "has done a terrible job explaining the stimulus package to the American people."

When media figures mock public ignorance, it always strikes me that we have an institution whose job it is to inform the public--and they work for it.  If the public doesn't know what it's supposed to, that tells us that our media system has serious problems.

Klein does note in an aside that Fox News has "misinformed" the public, but it's not just Fox--whose audience is tiny relative to the size of the population. And it's not really a problem of journalists messing up--the real problem is that they do their jobs the way corporate media expect them to.

Here's how you're supposed to report on the stimulus, if you work for a newspaper or daily TV news program:

Obama, GOP Spokesman Differ on Stimulus Results

That's from the Boston Globe (11/27/09), considered one of the most "liberal" corporate news outlets. The story that followed dutifully quoted the president claiming he had cut taxes and extended jobless benefits, followed by Rep. Mike Pence (R.-Ind)  saying that Democrats had taken the economy "from bad to worse with their failed economic agenda and big government plans." Who was right? The story gave readers not a clue, allowing the Globe to successfully avoid taking sides.

Or look at the piece from CNN (1/25/10) that set Klein off, reporting on a poll that found "3 of 4 Americans Say Much of Stimulus Money Wasted."  Is the public right to think that?  The CNN story doesn't say--it's just telling us what we think, not what the facts are.

Now, you do find the occasional report on a study that finds that, in fact, increased government spending does seem to result in lower unemployment. But such stories are  greatly outnumbered by the he-said, she-said of routine political coverage--few if any of which will refer back to the coverage that cited actual data about the stimulus program.  Expecting citizens to figure out on their own which side's line of the day is more credible is like randomly inserting passages from The Lord of the Rings into a history textbook and being surprised when students think Gandalf was a real person.

Klein had a follow-up post (1/25/10) in which he said that Americans, i.e. Time's main customers, are not actually stupider than the next nationality,  but were instead the victims of public schools, the reform of which has been blocked by  "teachers' unions and other educational reactionaries." Nevertheless, he continued to blame "lazy" citizens who "don't pay any attention to the news" or who "get their information from sources that feed their prejudices." Ironically, the progressive blogs that he's presumably including in that category are much more likely to tell their readers what's actually going on with the stimulus--and include a link pointing to evidence--than the "objective" corporate media outlets that Klein wishes people paid more attention to.

Time columnist Joe Klein (12/3/09) was not altogether impressed by Obama's announcement of a 30,000 troop escalation in Afghanistan (an "iffy proposition," as Klein put it). But Klein's main point was that Obama should have justified the war differently: "Once you have made the decision to go, or to redouble your efforts, you must lead the charge--passionately and, yes, with a touch of anger."

Then he describes the better way:

Ronald Reagan would have done it differently. He would have told a story. It might not have been a true story, but it would have had resonance. He might have found, or created, a grieving spouse--a young investment banker whose wife had died in the World Trade Center--who enlisted immediately after the attacks ... and then gave his life, heroically, defending a school for girls in Kandahar. Reagan would have inspired tears, outrage, passion, a rush to recruiting centers across the nation.

It's hard to know what's creepier: suggesting that a president should lie to drum up support for a war, or suggesting he should do so to fight a war you're not so sure about in the first place.

In his Time column this week, Klein writes:

So what should Obama do about Afghanistan? His dilemma isn't as stark as has been posed in recent press accounts, with screamers on the right demanding slavish devotion to the military's wish list and screamers on the left demanding a withdrawal. The U.S. military has become far more ... nuanced when it comes to making requests of presidents. The negotiations about what [Gen. Stanley] McChrystal can officially request will not take place anywhere near the public eye. It is very likely that more troops will be sent--to build and train the Afghan security forces, it will be said. Obama's problems on the left will be mitigated by the fact that most Democrats have also supported this war--as opposed to Iraq's--and have little desire to reverse themselves. They don't want to hurt the President, and they don't want to be perceived as weak on defense come election time.

OK, "screamers on the left" are demanding withdrawal. That would make "the left" the majority of the public, right? Klein counsels that left opposition will have little effect, since "most Democrats have also supported this war--as opposed to Iraq's--and have little desire to reverse themselves."  It's hard to figure out why this is true, or frankly why it would matter--the general public has reversed its opinion quite dramatically, hasn't it?

Apparently that doesn't much matter;  the real issue here are the Democratic politicians, who "don't want to hurt the president, and they don't want to be perceived as weak on defense come election time." Funny, then, that the public doesn't seem to mind being seen as "weak on defense," if that's really how one would describe opposition to escalating the war in Afghanistan.