All Politics is Personal

The death of Ted Kennedy filled television, I think even Fox News did a eulogy. Most of it was the same, no matter what channel you happened to have on the screen. The recent publication of his memoir, True Compass, only brings a lot of it back again.

Out of it all, there were only two comments that stuck with me. One came from John Kerry and the other from Joe Biden. Kerry continued to return to his paraphrase of Tip O'Neill's dictum that "All Politics is Local." Kerry said that he learned from Kennedy that "All politics is personal."

Biden gave a great example of what that really meant. Talking to GMA on the morning after Kennedy's death, Biden recounted this story.

On the day Barack Obama and Joe Biden were inaugurated as president and vice president, Sen. Ted Kennedy had a seizure that nearly took his life.

The next day Biden received a call from Kennedy, who joked about the seizure and then asked in a very serious tone how Biden's granddaughter was doing.

"What do you mean, Teddy?" Biden said.

"I'm afraid I frightened her. Is she OK?" he said.

Biden's granddaughter, Naomi, then 15 years old, had been sitting at Kennedy's table during the inauguration luncheon where he had the seizure. That is the essence of personal politics. Really caring about the people that you deal with. I don't see that often enough in the Green Party, especially in California. What I do see in personal attacks, innuendo, hurt feelings, retribution, grudges that have gone on far too long. None of these are Green and, as personal politics, none of them are effective. Maybe that is the way things are in other parties. I think all of the conflagration that surrounded Howard Dean and the Dems. Greens need to be better than that to be successful.

Fidelity to Fact

I don't want to step on Alex's important post, but also want to make a real point about politics and the media. So, read what Alex wrote, and then click read more below to join me on the jump.


Following the presidential conventions, I knew that Bill Moyer's Journal would feature a conversation between Moyers and Kathleen Hall Jamieson. I tuned in to Moyer's Journal on PBS last night and was not disappointed. It was a particularly pointed conversation because both McCain and Palin had taken shots at the Liberal Media. Of course, Liberal Media Bias has always been part of the Rush Limbaugh rant and this time it became almost a chant in St. Paul.

What Jamieson did was to indicate that there is nothing sexist about the media questioning the readiness of any of the candidates.

Is it fair to ask about the experience of any candidate for vice president? Of course. Any candidate for president? Of course. And it isn't sexist or racist to raise that question.

However, she had little patience for those who, in the haste to break a story, get it wrong.

Now you have a moment in which journalism has deceived its audience because in the rush to make this point about possible hypocrisy, a major commentator (Soledad Obrien) on a major network (CNN) has asserted as fact something which doesn't hold up. It took the FactCheck.org researcher that I called on my staff about four hours to get back to the primary research documents.

In fact, the story that Soledad used had been circulating on the internet for a while before she, or her producer, grabbed it.

Moyer's raised the question that all of us should be asking, what are we to do when we can't trust the media. Jamieson had analyzed this in terms of the 2004 election.

The problem is that one can't trust anymore from some of these sources that there's going to be a fidelity to fact in the presence of contest. One of the things that we showed in 2004, from the National Annenberg Election Survey, was that those who are reliant on Rush Limbaugh and on Fox News accepted the Republican view of the facts.

Those reliant on NPR and CNN were more likely to accept the Democratic view of the contested facts. Now sometimes there's legitimate contest. Sometimes, however, what you essentially had was spin and distortion on each side. Those who are relying on newspapers and traditional forms of news were still more likely to hold a non-contested view of those facts.

The further we get away from any sense that elections have anything to do with the contest of ideas. the more I sense that we are vulnerable to a fascist pupulism and that scares the hell out of me especially as newspapers seem to be losing readership daily.

Calling it like it is... chutzpah???

Thanks to a note from Genevieve Marcus, I found myself going through a blog called The Rehearsal Studio by San Francisco writer Stephen W. Smoliar. Since he write well about three subject that are dear to me... music, politics and the failures of the 5th Estate... I set up a feed to my browser and hit pay dirt on day two.

Here is a little fact the Smoliar unearthed and which very few others have mentioned, especially the nightly news broadcasts. The following four Senators did not bother to vote on the appointment of Judge Michael Mukasey as Attorney General.

Senator Joe Biden (DL)
Senator Hillary Clinton (NY)
Senator Chris Dodd (CN)
Senator Barack Obama (IL)

I seem that they all had something more important to do and anyway, their vote would not have counted. At least that is the way that Smoliar spins it. Better to read the entire post. I truly wonder whether Tim Russert will ask this one of Obama, who is his guest for the full hour on Meet the Press this Sunday morning.

After you read Smoliar's piece, take some time to ponner about all of the lesser of two evils pressure you will get to join the fight against the terrible Republicans. Join who in the fight? Not those four candidates. As my friend Alex would say, there was never a better time to vote Green.