To: “Long-Suffering” Jay Larson, Promotions Director, AM1280 “The Patriot”
From: Mitch Berg
Re: Promotions Ideas
Jay,
Let’s not do this. I don’t care what JB Doubtless and Brodkorb say. It can’t end well.
Regards and happy holidays,
Mitch Berg, NARN
Kate Parry is listed at the Strib’s “Reader’s Representative”. In her tenure at the Strib so far, that’s seemed to the unwashed masses to mean “Official Rationalizer” for everything the Strib does, right, wrong or absurd.
On Sunday morning, after a week where the Strib wiggled (so it claimed) away from charges of plagiarism, we found out what the problem was; “Reader’s Representative” means “propagandist”!
For instance, Sunday’s gauzy, soft-focus puffy on the Strib’s “Front Page Editor”.
Since July, [Colleen Stoxen] the 44-year-old North Dakota native has been the Star Tribune’s page one editor, a post short on the usual trappings of newsroom power: She has no staff and seldom has the final word on anything.
Yet, although dozens of hands will leave imprints on page one through the day, no one is more influential in determining what you will see there than Stoxen. Her considerable clout is wielded through acts of diplomacy and incisive observations injected throughout a marathon daily meeting regimen with key decisionmakers.
It’s hard out here for an editor. Sho nuff.
Of course, those “key decisionmakers” seem to be beyond Kate Parry’s keen analytical ken. For while we are now intimately aware of the life of the person who decides (or tries to decide) where the Pagemaker geeks will put things on Page One, we remain ignorant about the decisions about what goes in the stories, and who determines little things like editorial policy.
Who decided to go soft on Keith Ellison throughout the election, and why?
Who decided – as Rochelle Olson told us on the NARN before the election – that the fact that Alan Fine’s domestic abuse arrest never led to a charge didn’t warrant inclusion in the story Ms. Stoxen put on the front page? Even though the story was 32 column inches long, and included plenty of secondary facts that could have been pared down to make room for that simple fact?
Because while the anonymous efforts of the mass of mid-level functionaries that grind the paper out every day are fascinating mildly interesting, “reporting” on them really does nothing to “represent” the reader.
Answering hard questions about serious issues with more than a smug snark would be a start…
…but Parry’s had a couple of years of backing and filling and avoiding that job.
Al Franken’s show – which has been broadcasting from Minneapolis for most of the past year – has been “demoted”, sort of. Air America Minnesota, says this report by Strib media-beat writer Deborah Caulfield Rybak, is moving Fast Eddie Schultz to the 11-2PM slot (up against Rush Limbaugh), and “tape”-delaying Franken to the 2-5 slot:
Franken had no comment on the change, but “we’re not horribly offended,” said his executive producer. “They’re free to do whatever they like.”
“They” – Janet Robert’s KTNF (AM950) – are indeed. And rumor has long had it that there was little love lost between Robert – the wealthy, former mud-slinging DFL congressional candidate who is nonetheless pro-life and pro-Second Amendment – and free-spending, ultra-“progressive” liberal, and incompetent Air America. Rumors in the business have long held that Air America wanted to find a different Twin Cities affiliate.
Locally, [Franken] had been performing better in the Arbitron ratings than Shultz, but not by much. KTNF posted a 0.9 percent share of listeners ages 25 to 54 during Franken’s show and a 0.4 share during Shultz’s. Both are eclipsed by Rush Limbaugh, who attracted a 4.1 share of listeners on KTLK (100.3 FM) during the same period.
Side note: Little birds tell me that Dennis Prager and Michael Medved, on AM1280, are handily clobbering both of them as well. Of course, noting that would require Deb Rybak to acknowledge the Patriot’s existence and the fact that is it beating the crap out of not only Air America Minnesota, but also most of KTLK’s non-Limbaugh lineup. And duh, Deb; of course Franken’s numbers have been better than Fast Eddie’s; Franken is on mid-days, which is a lot less competitive than afternoon drives. It’ll be interesting to see if Franken has any numbers at all by the time he finally gives up the radio ghost.
I’ve taken my swipes at Nick Coleman before. He’s deserved quite a few.
He’s also written some good stuff. Yesterday’s was one of his best:
So the most infamous of the city’s 59 murders of 2006 closes with tears, a life sentenced to rot in prison, and a mystery. No one may ever understand how a 21-year-old with nothing on his record to warn he might kill, who was not a gangster — “not a menace to society,” as his mom, Yolanda, tearfully told the judge — how it came to a point he sprayed an entertainment block with gunfire.
“He’s not the worst person we’ve encountered in this system,” the judge said, noting that Holliday showed some remorse after his arrest.
Holliday had been in AmeriCorps, helped build a house for a homeless family, worked at the Y, was hoping to go to college and had a chance to turn out OK. Somehow, he ended up on a street with a gun. And he took two lives — Alan Reitter’s and his own.
It’s actually worth a read.
The Strib loudly laments the fall of journalism.
“TV stations air PR puff pieces and call it news”, they whinge…:
Last month, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) released its second report on television stations’ use of VNRs. One Minneapolis/St. Paul station was on the list. In June, KMSP-9 aired an entire, uncut VNR from General Motors. Station anchor Karen Scullin even introduced the narrating publicist, as if he were a reporter. No disclosure was provided to viewers.
While the need to clearly label such materials might seem obvious, an association of broadcast news professionals — the Radio-Television News Directors Association (RTNDA) — recently joined the PR industry in fighting to keep the status quo: many VNRs and no disclosure required.
Hmmm.
Yes. It would really be a problem if the media published uncritical puff pieces without giving the reader any context, wouldn’t it?
…and Frank Rich is no Walter Cronkite:
“As bad as things may seem now, they can yet become worse, and not just in Iraq.
“The longer we pretend that we have not lost there, the more we risk losing other wars we still may salvage, starting with Afghanistan.”
Wow. The President nominated the wrong Secretary of Defense!
Lori Sturdevant – who alone surpasses Doug Grow as the Twin Cities’ media’s most reliable DFL flak – must have been saving this piece for the Hatch/Dutcher coronation she felt the state so richly deserved. She must have dusted it off, changed a few tenses, and run it anyway.
For a not-insignificant share of Mike Hatch’s supporters, and maybe even some of his detractors, the most regrettable thing about the DFL gubernatorial ticket’s defeat last month is that Judi Dutcher won’t be lieutenant governor next year.
Just a brief aside here.
Newspaper columnists; could we retire the phrase “not-insignificant share” for describing a vanishingly small group of believers in a hopelessly picayune concept that is nonetheless a writer’s pet idea?
Judi Dutcher was, if anything, an emptier skirt that Amy Klobuchar. Her only clakim to fame is in being perhaps the state’s poster child for RINOism; she was a hopelessly, crushingly liberal Republican who turned coats (purely for political advantage) and joined the party she should have been in all along. So while her fans might be a “not-insignificant share” of people, I’d suspect that a more significant share, at least among those who care about such things, are glad to see the miserable wretch’s political career take its’ last spiral down the drain.
I digress. Sturdevant wants to make sure the people know Dutcher really does know about Ethanol:
“I felt terrible that people would think that Mike didn’t value ethanol, or that I didn’t know what it was,” Dutcher, a former state auditor, recalled in a recent interview…Minnesotans are forgiving people. My guess is that even in corn country, the vast majority of voters would have given her a pass for her forgetfulness.
They would have, that is, had Hatch not tripped on his own angry tongue as reporters pursued the Dutcher-E85 story.
It was good to hear from Dutcher that Hatch treated her much better than he did the inquiring Duluth News Tribune reporter who said Hatch called him a “Republican whore.” (“Mike was terrific,” she said. “He never made me feel bad.”)
Judi’s such a terriffic gal! And Mike Hatch! What a terriffic guy! Never mind all those former employees and their pesky stories about what a pint-sized Napoleon he is…
It was disappointing to hear that, in the weeks since Hatch first publicly blamed her gaffe for his defeat, then recanted, he has not contacted her personally to make amends. (“For the sake of the relationship that Mike and I enjoyed during the campaign, I’m not going to focus on that letter,” Dutcher said.)
Ah. So maybe “Mike” wasn’t so “terrific” after all?
No matter. One doesn’t read these columns expecting to see any smudge on Mike Hatch to be explored beyond the odd expository sentence.
No, one reads them to see the puffiness of the piece extended to a full eight years of what might have been:
But what was most worth hearing from the 44-year-old attorney and former foundation president was a reprise of her proposed job description for Minnesota’s lieutenant governor.
Her notion sprang from the genuine worry she — and plenty of others — have about widening divisions in this state’s body politic. Rural vs. metro, city vs. suburb, rich vs. poor, Republican vs. DFL — all the usual fault lines have widened into chasms. Not coincidentally, a troubling breach has developed between Minnesota citizens and state government. Getting things done at the state level has grown more difficult as a result.
As lieutenant governor, Dutcher wanted to throw herself into that breach and work to heal it.
“My job would be to work with every legislator, both sides of the aisle — get to know them, personally and professionally, and ask what issues are facing their communities. What can we in the governor’s office do to work with them to get the best results?”
In addition, she said, she planned to convene regional forums, aimed at bringing fresh ideas and more citizen input to bear on public problems.
“We’d bring together elected officials and the best public policy leaders in this state, to understand the emerging trends and how we can address them together,” she said. The topics she expected the forums to address, just for starters, included the aging of the population, business development, environmental protection, and education improvement. Rural development — ironically, in light of the E85 flap — was going to be a special emphasis.
“There’s so much work to do, I wish there were six lieutenant governors,” she said.
And knowing Dutcher’s record, there might have been. Or at least six Second Lieutenant Governors.
I’m not sure what to harp on here: Sturdevant’s notion that Judi Dutcher was anyone that could “bring together” anyone – she’s as left-of-center a figure as any in Minnesota politics – or that bringing anyone “Together” is desirable, or that the columnist’s plaintive cry to “get things done…” is anything but a cover for the unstated coda “…the DFL way”.
What Dutcher describes is quite different from what Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s reelected runningmate has been doing. Lt. Gov. Carol Molnau is also Transportation Commissioner Carol Molnau, the head of one of the largest and most important agencies of state government.
Four years ago, when Pawlenty announced that his lieutenant governor would also be his transportation chief, it sounded like a good bargain for the cash-strapped state. Molnau had the qualifications. She’d been a transportation specialist in the state House. She would fill two jobs for the price of the lower-salaried one.
Today, with the state once again in the black, the arrangement doesn’t seem as nifty. It implies no criticism of Molnau’s performance at MnDOT to observe that a commissioner who holds his or her own election certificate is hard for a governor to control.
What’s more, employing a lieutenant governor to run a state agency doesn’t take full advantage of the special asset the occupant of that office has. No other junior member of a governor’s administrative team is elected. He (or, since 1983, she) brings to the office a relationship with the voters.
Molnau’s double job aside…huh?
If 1/3 of the passersby on Nicollet Mall or on Main Street in Fergus Falls could name the Lieutenant governor (much less “who was the losing Lieutenant Governor candidate last November?”), I’d grant a “familiarity” between her and voters. But “Special Relationship?”
Using and building on that relationship as a liaison to the Legislature and the citizens, as Dutcher intended to do, would seem to be in a governor’s interest — and the state’s.
Judi Dutcher’s campaign has been ushered to the scrap heap of Minnesota history. Let her ideas lie on the heap where the voters sent them, to lie atop piles of Lori Sturdevant’s old columns.
Business is business, and your incessant ads are the price we pay for not paying for TV and Radio. Fair enough.
But those constant ads featuring the innumerable remixes of the Rolling Stones’ serviceable cover of the Soup Dragons’ classic “I’m Free” are almost enough to drive me to an all-cash lifestyle.
That is all.
A couple of points if you’re a hapless dolt (whose blog has three posts in a year) who threatens bloggers’ livelihoods over their disagreements:
Just saying.
UPDATE: Dolt asks what I’d do if I met him. (Don’t sweat the link – you’re not missing anything)
Simple.
#2, incidentally, will commence now.
Kate Parry, the Strib’s institutional self-justification specialist “Reader’s Representative”, writes about the Strib plagiarism scandal. Sort of:
The review, which began Thursday, is being conducted by a team working with Sandy Date, director of news research, and Rob Daves, director of strategic research.
Rob Daves? The majordomo of the Minnesota Poll, either the most inaccurate poll in the world or the most finely-tuned partisan tool in the media? Some investigation that’ll be. “Steve Berg founded New Yorker”.
Their charge is to examine the body of Berg’s work since January 2006 and determine if there are further similarities with other writers’ work. “We’ve been asked to move very quickly, but we’ve also been told the quality and accuracy of our work is paramount,” Daves said.
The jokes write themselves, sometimes.
During the two years I’ve been in this job, several times readers have pointed out what appears to them to be plagiarism by reporters and metro columnists. Sometimes, but not always, the allegations come from those who disagree with a columnist’s political views and know a plagiarism charge that sticks can severely damage a career.
Kate Parry – don’t you rely on that “our critics are partisans” schtick a bit much?
The stakes have never been higher for newspapers’ credibility. Some talk radio and blog commentators eager to win over newspaper readers and the advertising dollars that follow them delight in exploiting accusations of unethical behavior by journalists.
But others raise legitimate issues.
Actually, we bloggers and talk hosts raise legitimate issues – and as convenient as it may be to Parry to chalk the issues up to partisan sniping or moneygrubbing, the fact is that without us to call the public’s attention to the Strib’s many problems, Kate Parry certainly never would.
It’s important for newspapers to resist becoming so jaded about the partisan edges of so much media criticism that they fail to act on serious questions about ethics.
When Kate Parry ascribes nearly all criticism to partisan edges, what does “cynicism” mean anymore?
Then factor in the ease the Internet has brought to making publications worldwide available at the click of a mouse, exploding the amount of information at our fingertips and also making it easier than ever to sniff out plagiarism.
In that atmosphere, the last thing this newspaper should do is hand eager critics more ammo to keep firing away at problems resulting from sloppy research and writing.
If all of that still isn’t enough to make every writer in the building appropriately obsessive and even a bit paranoid about annotating notes and meticulously attributing words that didn’t originate in their brains, it should be.
And, um, it has been for about ten years.
Here’s a quick preview of a core lesson from that upcoming seminar: Plagiarism embarrasses the whole journalistic community and can derail promising careers.
But before you get to that ugly extreme, Kate Parry will be there to turn white into black in your defense.
Homeowner kills intruder:
Gerald Whaley told police that he was home alone when he heard what sounded like several intruders breaking in through his garage about 11 p.m. Minutes later, he shot a burglar once with the .22-caliber rifle he kept loaded by his bed. The intruder stumbled downstairs and collapsed in the home on the 11700 block of Bittersweet Street.
Whaley, who had no phone, got dressed, climbed out onto a second-floor deck and went next door to call police. The intruder was dead when police found the youth, whose name wasn’t released Tuesday.
And then the Strib reporter dug up a Dostoyevskian biography on Mr. Whaley, detailing years of housing code citations – possibly germane to the shooting – and his battle with the Anoka-Hennepin School Board, which isn’t.
This is the same Strib that figured that reporting Alan Fine’s complete innocence of a charge in a 35 inch story reported on page A1 was being excessively thorough.
The Strib Editorial board yesterday cried crocodile tears about the tone of this state and nation’s political debate, in the form of a paeon to the healing power of Thanksgiving. The piece starts out well, as far as it goes:
The platters circled and tensions rose until some word or gesture or foregone rejoinder — invisible even afterward! — made possible a turning point, and it all turned out all right.
Remember what Tolstoy said about happy families being all alike? We might suggest that picture-book Thanksgivings are all the same, while each stress-tested celebration that ends well is a triumph of unique circumstances, proving anew the wide possibilities of peacemaking.
Indeed – what a wonderful sentiment!
And then it makes a turn that makes one wonder – Did the Strib farm this editorial out to one of their regular writers’ wives? Or does the Strib really believe this stuff?
In today’s America the distinctive flavor of political life is bitterness. It is not the depth of our differences that distinguishes this era so much as the rancor of our arguments, a thoroughgoing disrespect for opposing ideas and the people who hold them, for the weight of facts and the worth of pluralism.
But we who fashion this page want to believe that if families and friends can heal their long-nursed hostilities with the help of roast turkey and root vegetables, then there is hope for bridging the merely political disputes among the players in our newly redivided government — and among the partisans who put them there.
We want to believe that the elections just past have created the possibility of a turning point, a chance to change not only the course of the nation but the tone of its conversations.
We want to believe that people who can shelve seething resentment for the sake of getting through a holiday meal with their families can do the same in service of healing for our country. Don’t you?
Year after difficult year, the lesson of Thanksgiving is that all of us bring our faults and imperfections, our personal burdens of blame, to the feast table. If we behave ourselves and give others the benefit of our doubts, we may just leave it with a helping of grace.
Ah. So we can expect the Strib to take a step back and recognize that conservative Republicans believe what we do for a reason, and quit referrring to every conservative as a “divisive” “extremist”?
We can expect the Strib to report the whole story, even if telling the whole truth exonerates Republicans?
Sorry, Strib editors. I don’t believe a word of it.
…the Stephanie Miller Show the first time I heard it…
…when it was called the Laura Ingraham Show.
Seriously. Same sound effects. Same drops. Same production style. Same basic idea.
Laura should be getting royalties.
Rumors that Air America might be on the ragged brink of folding are making their way around the business.
The other day, I castigated the Strib’s editorial board for its dubious command of history.
What do you suppose the odds are that I’d have to do it again? This time the offender is Syl Jones, the man who combines Lori Sturdevant’s keen evenhandedness, Nick Coleman’s writing chops, and Aaron McGruder’s sharp-eyed rejection of racial cliches.
He’s just as good when it comes to history! This time, he’s comparing the President’s proposed “exit strategy” with our departure from Vietnam:
But there is something else afoot here. The folks who brought you “peace with honor” in Vietnam, officially proclaimed in January of 1973 by Republican President Richard Nixon, are also preparing to make a similar phony declaration in Iraq.
If you don’t remember that original declaration, all you need to understand is that our government’s goal during the war was to prevent the fall of Vietnam into Communist hands. Not only did we fail to do so but our 12-year presence there also inflamed a generation of Communists who subsequently slaughtered millions of their own people.
For starters, Syl, the Communists never needed to be “inflamed” to slaughter their own people. Or did you ever read about any of this?
While the United States may not be directly responsible for the atrocities committed after it departed, anyone except the most partisan observer would be forced to admit that the whole enterprise could be blamed on a form of faulty intelligence: the domino theory.
No, Syl. The fact that we got involved in a conventional land war in Asia could be blamed on the Domino Theory. The fact that we got into it with hundreds of thousands of conventional troops is blamed on John F. Kennedy’s need for an easy PR win after the debacle of the Bay of Pigs. But the Killing Fields? That happened because we left – and broke our promise to return if things got bad.
Speaking of “things getting bad”, how are Syl Jones’ thought processes working these days?
Developed primarily by President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, the domino theory was a racist canard that stemmed directly from Dulles’ days as chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation. In that capacity, he traveled the world with John D. Rockefeller in an effort to convince his boss that the nonwhite populations of the world were growing too rapidly and must be contained.
Just re-read that graf a few times and let it sink in. Syl Jones thinks that containing communism meant containing non-white people.
(No. That would have been Margaret Sanger‘s thing).
But unlike Vietnam, where the Communists had little desire to kill Americans outside their borders, the militant Islamic insurgency is determined to end American hegemony everywhere. Peace with honor will therefore prove to be impossible in Iraq. To end this war, the American people will unfortunately be forced to face dishonor in the extreme, with little hope of ever finding peace.
That, or seeing this thing through.
So, Syl – you join me in rejecting the Democrats’ call for a fast, PR-slathered withdrawal?
From the latest Nick Coleman column:
Spare me the hate mail. I’m cool with the Lord. But I still love that old sing-along, “They Will Know We Are Christians By Our Love.” It doesn’t say “by our self-righteousness.”
*cough cough cough cough*
Wow. I…
cough cough Cough koff koff.
Whew. Sorry. I was having trouble swallowing that statement.
Oh, and I love the column’s title: “Another Minnesota Culture Warrior Forgets How To Make Minnesota Nice”.
Note to the Twin Cities Democrat Mainstream Media; could we, at long last, please retire that phrase?
The Strib editorial board tries to lecture the President on history – and proves they’ve never read any.
They’re jabbering about Bush’s visit to Hanoi. Bush made a remark that was an oversimplification, perhaps, when applied to Vietnam…:
My first reaction is history has a long march to it, and societies change and relationships can constantly be altered to the good,” Bush said. The lesson for Iraq, he said, is that, “It’s just going to take a long period of time for the ideology that is hopeful and that is an ideology of freedom to overcome an ideology of hate.” Then he added, “We’ll succeed, unless we quit.”
…with its customary, presumptive sniffing and phumphering:
Fortunately the diplomats at the conference were much too polite to guffaw Bush out of the room, though that last statement was a complete misrepresentation of what has happened in Vietnam. In a nutshell, Vietnam succeeded after and arguably because we quit.
The editors go in one sentence from helicopters on the embassy roof to a Vietnam that’s recovering and flirting with capitalism.
And about those 25 pesky years in between? Killing fields (which were in Cambodia, but part of the larger war, and part of the same panicked, Democrat-led US abandonment)? Boat people? Re-education camps? Piles of bodies?
Not, apparently, part of the Star/Tribune’s institutional memory – nor that of the Democrats, who refused to acknowledge their existence three decades ago; the inevitable results of a “cut and run” policy by any name.
American-Vietnam relations warmed only after Clinton got Americans to accept, grudgingly at the time (and Republicans were the biggest grudgers), that we needed to move on from the defeat we’d suffered in Indochina.
Republicans begrudged ignoring the defeat (that killed 50,000+ Americans) while Democrats wallowed in it, making it the key to their “foreign policy” to this day.
And perhaps in their spittle-flecked anti-Bush fervor they forgot that the Vietnamese, who suffered hundreds of thousands of dead, may not have been thrilled with the idea either.
If there’s a lesson in Vietnam for American policy in Iraq, it’s that the United States must be able to recognize the lost cause staring it in the face, deal with it and move on.
And if there’s a lesson in Vietnam for Democrats and the Strib editorial board (pardon the redundancy), it’s that the United States bails out with a job half-done, it’s no worse than (allegedly) going into a war for all the wrong reasons. It’s not “planning for the peace”, to put it in Democrat terms.
So when he spoke in Hanoi, Bush was a little bit right: Vietnam does offer lessons for Iraq. But the lessons it offers are far different from those Bush, in his ahistorical fashion, sought to concoct.
And far different than the Strib chose to selectively present.
I don’t necessarily believe that the Star/Tribune’s news editors sit around looking for ways to boost the DFL. I think the DFL is their only frame of reference when it comes to personal and institutional worldviews; they are like extras in Pauline Kael’s classics response to news of Nixon’s 1972 victory, “none of my friends voted for him!“.
Lori Sturdevant, on the other hand, exceeds even Doug Grow in her rank partisanship. Sunday’s column is full of the sort of grating, presumptive self-adulation that Sturdevant took to new personal heights in this past election.
I’m going to skip most of it, because honestly I can probably paste in parts from every other Sturdevant column I’ve ever fisked over the past 57 months and get the same effect. I can almost write the stereotype Sturdevant column, in fact:
Minnesotans love their government. Minnesotans NEED their government. Government is as much a part of the Minnesota character as breathing and passive-aggression. A few Republicans want to change that – but there’s hope we can roll back the tide and keep government…er, Minnesota happy.
I don’t think I’m exaggerating that much.
But here’s the part that frosts me (and this is really from Sturdevant’s column):
Those polled said in heartening numbers that they still think Minnesotans can solve their shared problems. But they are increasingly skeptical about using what has historically been a powerful tool for doing so — state government. Minnesotans need reasons to believe in their government again — and if this governor and Legislature are going to provide them, they need to keep this season’s spirit alive.
“Minnesotans need reasons to believe in their government again”…or else what? Minnesota has minuscule unemployment, a better-educated, healthier and often-happier population than almost anywhere in the nation…what’s to fix?
Government is not the vehicle of our hopes and dreams, much less the solution to our problems. Government is an employee – a lazy, arrogant one that the rules only allow us to fire every so many years.
Sturdevant is fantasizing about a “golden age” of Minnesota politics, where Republicans and Democrats “got along” and “cooperated” to enact a vision of government…
…that was purely the DFL’s. Sturdevant moons and fawns over an era where the Republicans were too gutted out – by the FDR era, by the era of Big Government it spawned, and ultimately by Watergate – to do anything but. An era – and “spirit” – that gave us huge, arrogant government with boundless appetite, and a populace that had been so sotted with the material rewards of keeping the status quo in power than it didn’t care – until the bills started coming due.
Things have changed. Minnesotans are starting – at 40-years’-long last – to take responsibility for their lives, and for regulating government’s role in them. November 7 was a hiccup along the way – the next decade will show it.
And Lori Sturdevant and her ilk will be there, no doubt, in ten years’ time, kvetching about those damn conservatives, not playing along with the people of Minnesota the DFL.
The November 7 elections are going to have some unintended consequences in this state.
Among the worst – and one that some of us who follow these things predicted – is the fallout from the election of vacuous political-party-boy Mark Ritchie to the Secretary of State’s office.
Ritchie – whose sole notable political experiences are “serving” as a bureaucrat and running the pressure group whose sole accomplishment was plastering those annoying “November 2” bumper stickers on the backs of rusty Subarus and gaunt Volvos nationwide – has big plans, apparently, for Minnesota elections.
Big, liberal-benefitting plans.
Which is, naturally, why the Strib loves them:
Tim Pawlenty might not appreciate being likened to Bill Clinton. But the Republican governor has at least this much in common with the former Democratic president: He was just elected for a second time by a plurality, not a majority. In Minnesota in 2002 and 2006, as in the presidential elections in 1992 and 1996, a third-party candidacy kept the winning vote total below 50 percent.
That’s not an ideal outcome — for the winner or the state. Clinton’s experience attests to as much. Throughout his presidency, he was denigrated by his partisan opponents as a less-than-legitimate occupant of the White House. Those election results emboldened those who sought to unseat him via impeachment in 1998.
But – the Strib’s editorial board should know this – the impeachment had nothing to do with Clinton’s lack of mandate, but rather his dishonesty; the weakness his lack of mandate granted his administration benefitted the country as a whole, in those prewar days when gridlock was a good thing that forced Clinton to abandon the social dabbling of his first two years.
In other words, the system worked. A divided nation was led by a weak administration, and a Congress that was mandated (in ’94) to oppose his would-be excesses. It benefitted everyone…
…except those who believe that government should operate as an efficient, well-oiled law-production machine. To them, the notion that the “efficiency” of government might be hobbled by the electoral system is an aberration.
And an opportunity to accrete more power to government – for government’s (and your) own good, dammit!:
But one thing may have been gained: a growing recognition that Minnesota would benefit from a different voting system. Ideally, it would be one that allows as many candidates to run for high office as this state’s tradition of easy ballot access permits, but that still gives the winner claim to majority support. The vote-by-number balloting method known as instant runoff voting fits the bill
Where “the bill” means “a recipe to make government more powerful and less responsive to the voters, at any rate.
But the Strib – mooning and panting at the thought of a chance for “Better Government” (read: more power lodged in Saint Paul) will waterboard all logic:
But the results of last week’s election were only minutes old when DFL voices began tagging Pawlenty as the “46.7 percent governor.” Any claim to a voter mandate Pawlenty might have made was immediately undercut. Any chance for the 53-plus percent of voters who preferred another candidate to coalesce and redirect state policies was lost too.
Let’s strive for accuracy, here: The 53-plus percent who didn’t vote for Pawlenty didn’t vote for “another candidate”. They voted for one of half a dozen other candidates; mostly Mike Hatch, but a pathetic few for Peter Hutchinson, a scraggly flotsam for Ken Pentel, and others for Libertarians, Constitution Partiers, and a small gaggle of other mini-parties.
Some of the ills big-party loyalists attribute to the rise and persistence of the Independence and Green parties are misplaced. More accurately, they are consequences of multiparty contests being decided by a plurality-take-all voting system.
And, more accurately still, they are not “ills” at all. They are how the system works, and it is good that it does so. The wishes of the voters are counted in a 1:1 ratio with the votes they cast. And if your party can’t gain a majority – if it can’t convince people that one of the most successful governors in America today, a governor who erased an “un-fixable” $4 billion deficit, isn’t a better choice than the pettifogging, temper-addled little Napoleon-complex poster child that the other party put forth – then not only will that governor’s party deserve to govern without a mandate, but the people of Minnesota will get a gridlocked, mandate-free government. People get the government they deserve.
Unless the Strib has its way. Then it’ll get the best government that an incomprehensibly-complex, computer-validated formula can give them.
Instant runoff voting would present those same candidates with an incentive to reach outside their parties’ ideological cores. Victory in close multicandidate elections would require a blend of first and second-choice votes. A narrowly partisan campaign would not get the second-choice votes needed for victory.
In other words, it’d drive the state’s government toward the mushy, dim middle. Which is no choice at all. The Strib doesn’t seem to credit the Minnesota voter with a lot of intelligence – easy to do in a state where Mark Ritchie and Rebecca Otto beat vastly-superior incumbents, but not really a spirit in which Democracy can thrive.
Last week, Minneapolis voters approved a switch to instant runoff voting for the next city election, in 2009. That exercise should be seen as a pilot project for the whole state.
Between now and then, the Legislature should give instant runoff a thorough hearing, and direct the next secretary of state, Mark Ritchie (an instant runoff voting supporter), to make preliminary plans for a switch. If the system serves Minneapolis well in 2009, it should be ready for the whole state in 2010.
“Give it a hearing, and direct Ritchie to make the switch”? Wow – sounds like a fair process!
This is madness for a couple of non-partisan reasons. For starters, a “Test” in Minneapolis would be completely meaningless; Minneapolis is to all intents and purposes a one-party town (Greens have a power base, but Greens, for all their kvetching, are just ultraorthadox DFLers). Minnesota is another story.
And does anyone else catch the absurd double-standard? A newspaper that bitched and moaned endlessly about the perils of electronic vote tabulation (as long as they were perceived to benefit Republicans – somehow, Diebold isn’t a threat to democracy these days) is suddenly ready to place full faith into a system that depends entirely on utterly-untested froo-froo technology?
This is a power grab for the left and their apologists, frustrated that the game is too close, these days, for the system to keep them in power. They want to fix that.
It needs to be stopped.
I saw the City Pages cover “Story” about the GOP non-victory party – basically a printed liveblog.
On the one hand, it was a potpourri of fiskable blather.
On the other hand, fisking dumb newspaper articles in a town like Minneapolis is like throwing spitballs at Mormons in Provo; it’s not very challenging, and eventually the mind yearns for other things.
But it did need to get thrashed. So thank goodness for Learned Foot, who did the job.
“Highlight”:
1600: I continue to be looked down upon, condescended to, and ignored by every person in the building. It sucks to be so unhip, what with me having children and refusing to wear non-prescription eyeglasses and all.
Read the whole thing.
Of course, some parts of the CP “article” fisk themselves. Given the City Pages’ record of seeing what they want to see (or, according to some reports, what their editors want them to see) when in rooms full of Republicans, it’s perhaps no surprise that this fella turned up:
8:35 p.m.: In the Navigators bar on the hotel’s ground floor, a group of five revelers expounds on race relations. “There’s a difference,” explains one of them. “It depends on what kind of blacks you’re talking about. There’s the light-skinned blacks and the dark-skinned blacks. And they’re different. But you can’t just say that.”
I doubt that these five “revelers” said any such thing, any more than this happened:
And Sen. Michele Bachmann offered praise for blogger Mitch Berg: “You’re my hero!” she exclaimed, while hugging him from behind.
Paul Demko and G.R. Anderson; while I have no doubt that some Republican, somewhere, might have said such a thing, I have my doubts that any at the Sheraton last Tuesday said it to either of you (Got a tape?) – and in any case, so waht? The most toxic, noxious, xenophobic racist I have ever met face to face in my life was a DFL organizer. No, no tapes, although I could provide an eyewitness or two from among those who knew him. Do we write this person off as a dolt, or do we use him to titter about what a bunch of ignorant racists the DFL are?
Well, y’all have pretty well made that choice. But how about the rest of you?
UPDATE AND BUMP: Gary Miller is less accomodating:
Bull. Shit.
Norman Lear could not have concocted a more bogus “conservative” archetype. Demko and Anderson spend a grand total of 5 minutes outside the Sheraton ballroom (for a quick cocktail, apparently) and just happen to stumble across five young jackboots plotting some sort of apartheid-like “homelands” based on skin pigmentation?
In my 20+ years of involvement with conservative politics I have never stumbled across even one such hateful conversation. Indeed, it is my experience that conservatives are markedly less fixated on matters of race than are our opponents. But we are invited to believe by Messrs. Anderson and Demko that such parlays are commonplace where conservatives congregate.
It has been twelve years since the GOP endured a drubbing like they did last Tuesday so Anderson and Demko can be forgiven the mirth and schadenfreude bleeding through their chronicles.
What they can not be forgiven is making stuff up. There is little doubt in my mind that is exactly what was done in this shameful potboiler.
Given the CP’s record of making sh*t up about Republicans, I’m going to amend my earlier request for that tape.
Maloney says Franken is bailing on Air America Radio:
We’re hearing that Al Franken is leaving Air America and giving up on talk radio, most likely for good.
His last day on the air will apparently be December 8. Already, a few libtalk stations have begun to leak word of Franken’s impending exit.
In the meantime, stations have been bailing out on Air America; five in the past week, according to Maloney.
It’s probably a fair time to go into the wayback machine and check up on my predictions. On March 11, 2004 – about three weeks before the network aired – I predicted:
My predictions are as follows:
- “Uprising”: Comics are as stable as show poodles. I say the show has burned through both of its co-hosts in the first six months, and is “re-worked” by September 31.
- “Unfiltered”: Lilywhite Winstead is a snide, hip, too-cool-for-school comic. Chuck D is a hard-edged polemicist. Separately, neither invites conversation. Together, I see the show being as much fun as a MacAlester teach-in. I predict Chuck bails within six months.
- “O’Franken” – For starters; basing your show’s identity on a slap against your rival merely plays his game, and shows the…well, stupidity of FrankenNet’s executive suite. Second: I’m trying to figure out Al Franken’s reaction when he realizes his sidekick is Katherine Lanpher, the overrated dim-bulb of MPR fame. I say Lanpher’s out by March 21, 2005, and the show grinds to a halt by September 30, 2006.
- Randi Rhodes: Gone by March 31, 2005.
- “Majority Report”: Garofalo is an acquired taste when you’re watching her do comedy in a room; much of her appeal (and I’ll admit right here – she has appeal) is physical; her face is half of her act. Note to FrankenNet’s brain trust; on radio, nobody can see your face! I give it six months: By 9/30/04, Garofalo will be gone.
- Finally – FrankenNet will get a major re-tooling by September 31, 2004. Most of its original lineup will be gone as noted above. Its first major affiliate will switch formats by 3/31/05, and the network will be officially dead by 3/31/06.
Count on it.
So how’d I do?
So I think it’s time to start the dead pool. Everyone sound off in the comments; what date do you think FrankenNet will finally assume room temperature?
Closest guess wins!
Ann Coulter, noting the paucity of mainstream media coverage of Condi Rice’s achievements, wonders why Nancy “First Woman Speaker” Pelosi is big news at all:
But when Nancy Pelosi — another Democrat who married a multimillionaire — achieves the minor distinction of becoming the first female speaker of the House, The New York Times acts like she’s invented cold fusion.
There were two major articles breathlessly reporting Pelosi’s magnificent achievement as first female speaker and an op-ed by Bob Herbert, titled “Ms. Speaker and Other Trends.” Beatifying Pelosi as “the most powerful woman ever to sit in Congress,” Herbert began: “Sometimes you can actually feel the winds of history blowing.” There was a major Times profile of Pelosi, gushing that Pelosi was “on the brink of becoming the first female speaker.” (Isn’t she just the most independent little gal?)
So in addition to bringing back a cut-and-run national security strategy, tax-and-spend domestic policy and a no-enforcement immigration policy, the new Democratic Congress is apparently ushering in a return to feminist milestones.
Democrats: You women had better just be grateful!
Last Tuesday was a buzzkill across the board; one of the biggest whacks upside the head was Phil Krinkie’s narrow (55 vote) loss.
Bob Collins at MPR’s Polinaut on a bump’n run City Pages interview with Krinkie:
City Pages interviews Phil Krinkie, who lost his re-election bid. He says he hopes for a stalemate and thinks the voters should be punished. That goes against the whole “let’s work together theme.”
Here’s the CP’s actual interview, quoting Krinkie:
“But I want to leave you with a quote from Ed Koch, the former mayor of New York. When he got beaten by David Dinkins, he said, ‘The voters have spoken and now they must be punished.’ I have a feeling that’s what may be in store for the people of Minnesota.”
Mr. Collins: Your version (“the voters should be punished”) implies a petulance that is absent from Krinkie’s actual statement.
Perhaps being freed from the angst of being a political minority in a state he believes is “his” (for a couple of years, anyway) is helping. Or perhaps he’s just come to terms with the fact that he’s no political commentator.
But Nick Coleman has managed to write a column that skirts perilously close to a number of inconvenient truths.
He’s writing about Target Corporation’s plea for property tax relief from Hennepin County:
Luckily, when it comes to helping bail out billion-dollar outfits, Hennepin County sets the standard for compassion.
Earlier this year, the County Board came to the rescue of Carl (Big Pockets) Pohlad, handing him half a billion (a billion, when you count the interest taxpayers will pay). Hennepin County has become a beacon to the needy, and this important charity work has attracted other hungry billionaires, such as Zygi Wilf, who is thinking of getting in line for an $800 million stadium. I don’t know about you, but this kind of charity work makes me proud. When you can feel good by doing good, then you are on the right track. No corporation should be left behind.
Well, that’s kinda what happens when a group – a state, a church, a nation, whatever – gets into the habit of subsidizing things, to say nothing of picking and choosing what to subsidize.
Minnesota – and especially Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis – has always subsidized two things:
Coleman:
Once upon a time, companies like Target were ashamed to ask for handouts from a government that had kids to feed and libraries to run and cops to hire. Thankfully, we no longer live in hard times. The welfare queens and their babies — it’s always, “Feed me, wah, wah, feed me!” with these kids — have been kicked off the welfare rolls to make room for worthier recipients.
Except that Minnesota never actually kicked anyone off of welfare. Oh, the state added the thinnest possible veneer of “workfare” and “up and off” windowdressing to its panoply of programs. But at the end of the day, Minnesota still has the most “generous” welfare benefits in the Midwest.
Now – if you accept that putting a bottomless pot of money in front of a bunch of billionaires will draw a parade of Wilfs and Pohlads and Targets and Best Buys begging for their piece of the freebie pie, what makes anyone think that the poor behave any differently? If you give away things, you’ll draw takers. If you make a habit of it, the crowd of takers will stick around for more.
Coleman snipes:
I don’t know why it took so long, but Minnesota finally has turned into the kind of welfare state worth having.
A corporate welfare state.
Coleman is too modest. Minnesota has always been a welfare subsidy state. It’s a big part of the state’s very mythology; from our “compassionate” welfare poverty subsidies to our “public/private partnerships” which provide corporate welfare subsidies to business, to the “Happy to Pay For A Better Minnesota” campaign which is welfare for government workers a plea for endless subsidy of the public class, Minnesota’s very “compassionate” ethos is built on taking money from those who earn it and giving it to those whom government, for whatever reason, favors.
And it’s something that Coleman, like his father before him, has enthusiastically supported at every turn…
…unless the welfare applicant has a corporate logo.
Back in the late seventies/early eighties, my little sister – like a lot of early-teens – pined for the disco stars of the era. And I think that, in her thirteen-year-old way, she might at one point have asked “how cool would it be if Andy Gibb joined the Bee Gees?” [1]
In yesterday’s Strib editorial, Lori Sturdevant dreamed of a one-party state:
In my daydream, Mike Hatch and Dean Johnson stood alongside Tim Penny and Peter Hutchinson (and in some versions, the Green Party’s Ken Pentel). They were surrounded by a bevy of Minnesota’s progressive glitterati.
Interesting phrase, “progressive glitterati”. We will have to come back to that.
Amid gentle joshes and handshakes all around, they announced the merger of their parties, with a new platform blending the best of the old, and a new name. (Did I hear somebody suggest the Minnesota Democratic Party?) The ghost of Hubert Humphrey, the last wizard to pull off a major party merger in Minnesota, hovered about, beaming.
If I were my younger, cruder self, the response would write itself. Fortunately, I’m older, wiser, and more rhetorically sober. Just so you know.
But onward and upward. Sturdevant isn’t merely dreaming. She wants to get those damn smart-alecky Ventura Independence Party heretics to rejoin the mother party!
The DFL candidate for governor missed the brass ring by fewer than 22,000 votes, out of more than 2 million cast. Hutchinson got about 141,000 votes. Had he not been in the race, some of those 141,000 would have gone to GOP Gov. Tim Pawlenty. Some might have stayed home. But it’s hard not to believe that enough of them would have gone to Hatch to put him in the governor’s office.
And apostasy, to a committed DFL flak (or “progressive glitterata”) like Sturdevant, has consequences:
I can also scratch Hutchinson and Penny, the previous bearer of the IP’s gubernatorial standard. Not even Tuesday’s drubbing has them interested in merging with anybody. They think the Independence Party has only just begun to grow.
Hutchinson talked Tuesday night like somebody starting a long campaign, not ending one with 6.4 percent of the vote. “Minnesotans did not send us here just to start this race. They sent us here to finish it,” he said. “As a party, as a people, it is our duty to do that.”
It’s fair to question whether he’s thinking straight about who, in a democracy, gets to do the political finishing.
“Who, in a democracy, gets to do the political finishing”?
One wonders who Sturdevant actually does think “gets” to do the “political finishing”. “Progressive glitterati”, or voters and people who want to run for office based on their own ideas, ideals and passions.
It’s a valid question, given that Sturdevant’s concern for “democracy” seems to be entirely filtered through the institution of the DFL:
He’s right about this much: They’ll have money. Hutchinson squeaked past the 5 percent bar in state law that bestows major-party status and access to public funds in the next campaign.But will the IP have a distinct and salable reason to exist in 2008 or 2010? Voters evidently had trouble finding one this time. Hutchinson had his own slant on the issues, but it was a slant in the DFL’s direction.
Penny says the Independence Party’s raison d’être is twofold: 1) It stands for honest budgeting, as opposed to DFLers who promise too much, then underfund the big things, and Republicans who keep trying to have something for nothing. 2) It wants government disconnected from special interests.
In my daydream, the DFL took up those causes to the IP’s satisfaction. Actually, House Speaker-designate Margaret Anderson Kelliher is moving that way. Her commitment to do the big things right on a fiscally prudent budget signals an end to DFL overpromising.
Um, no, it “signals” the DFL is trying to get people to shut up about its many shortcomings as a governing party, and get the foot soldiers – like Sturdevant – in line.
She already has government reform on her agenda. Bringing the state’s campaign finance system into the Internet era, with disclosure rules that preclude anonymous end-of-campaign ad bombs, belongs on her list.
Further restrictiosn on free (if arguably objectionable) speech! Such a “reform!”
But one begins to wonder whether there can be any satisfying a crowd that views its 6.4 percent of the vote as a mandate to press on. It increasingly looks as if they would rather stand apart and hope that the lightning of 1998 will strike again than participate in governing this state now.
I’m awake now. I don’t see a reunion of Minnesota progressives on the horizon. And without one, there likely won’t be an inauguration of a progressive governor to cover, either.
So there you have it, all you V IPers; stop your petty objections about financial responsibility! Why, the Speaker-Designate has made a non-binding pre-campaign promise to maybe uphold one of your (most trivlal-yet-authoritarian) campaign ideas!
With brains like this measuring the drapes in their new offices, who needs reform?
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