Why the Media Likes Personality: Most Reporters Don't Know Policy

There is an amazing post over at Cleveland.com in which PD reporter Mark Naymik takes some shots at how Clinton came across during her endorsement interview. Apparently she acted as if she knew more than the PD writers and she didn't ask them for their endorsement. Now, this caught our attention because right now in our house people are reading The Big Con by Jonathon Chait. It is a very fascinating book and deals with how believers in supply-side economics managed to convince the media and the public that this whacked-out economic theory was viable.

One of the most important reasons he cites is that most reporters don't know issues and don't want to learn issues. Therefore, according to Chait, they "scorn campaigns rooted in issues and lacking a personal narrative." Which leads us to the blog entry by Naymik. Nowhere in his entry does Naymik discuss any point of policy which was important to the PD in giving its endorsement to Obama. The tone of the entry can be found from this closing paragraphs:

Clinton is a fine candidate.

But she isn't paying attention to one of the messages voters sent Democrat John Kerry in 2004: Nobody likes a smarty-pants.

Basically he is telling candidates for public office that the PD doesn't really care what you know, they care how you get along with them. Interestingly, in the same blog, he points out that Senator John McCain was actually talking to someone else while do his telephone interview with the PD. Now, that strikes us as more than a little rude, but apparently being rude is more acceptable to the PD than knowing too much about the issues or not asking the editorial board for its endorsement. Naymik takes care to mention that both Obama and McCain did just that. Oh, and he also liked the fact that John McCain made a bad joke about "waterboarding."

The other thing that he doesn't point out is that relatively few Americans met John Kerry during his campaign for the presidency. So where did this belief that he was a "smarty-pants" come from? Why, the media, of course, only Naymik either doesn't realize it or doesn't want to acknowledge it.

Look, you can complain all you want about the fact that most media personnel are not really all that interested in issues, or you can accept it and try to go with the candidate who has the better personality. We realize it is aggravating, but you are probably not going to change the culure of the media during one campaign cycle.

Thanks to Jill Miller Zimon of Writes Like She Talks for bringing this to everyone's attention.

And This Guy Wants to be Speaker of the Ohio House?

Jill Miller Zimon of the blog Writes Like She Talks first brought this to our attention. Matt Dolan wants to be Speaker of the Ohio House. He is giving money to his Republican colleagues hoping that they will elect him Speaker over State Representative Bill Batchelder of Medina County.

Okay, so we will admit to a bias here. Our position is that if a Republican has to be Speaker of the Ohio House, we would like it to be Bill Batchelder. One reason is that while he is conservative, he is very competent. Batchelder wouldn't pull a stunt like this one by Dolan.

Last spring Dolan pushed for a bill that would allow consumers to buy out-of-state wine from wineries in places like Napa Valley and Sonoma. He was pushing this bill to comply with a ruling from the United States Supreme Court. Something happened, however, in the Senate. It was changed so that only wineries that produce under 63,000 cases of wine a year can ship directly to Ohio consumers. The more than 100 Ohio wineries fall under that threshold, but big out of state wineries do not.

How did this happen? Listen to the explanation from Dolan:

"It was not supposed to apply to consumers," Rep. Matthew Dolan, a Russell Township Republican and chairman of the House Finance Committee, said Tuesday. "When it came back from the Senate, I probably didn't read it as closely as I should have." The above quote is from an article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer dated September 25, 2007.

Look our point isn't that this is a bad bill from a policy standpoint or a philosophical standpoint. Our point is that if you want to be Speaker of the House, you ought to know what is going on with legislation you think is important. If you can't follow your own bills, how are you going to follow all the important pieces of legislation in the House?

Jill Miller Zimon Raises Good Point: Why Didn't PD Do Story on Ohio Trending Blue?

Jill Miller Zimon, who is the author and owner of Writes Like She Talks a blog that covers writing, education, children, and politics raised a really interesting point in a posting that appeared on www.cleveland.com on Tuesday, September 25, 2007 She asked the question why was the Dayton Daily News and not the Plain Dealer doing a story on exurban counties trending Democratic. One of the counties that was profiled by the Dayton Daily News is Medina County which, as Jill noted, is much closer to Cleveland than it is to Dayton. (She was also kind enough to mention our own MCDAC Blog, which was certainly nice of her and appreciated.)

Of course, part of the problem may be that Medina County is much better known to the Cleveland Plain Dealer than to the Dayton Daily News. As a result they may not have been as impressed by Senator Sherrod Brown carrying Medina County since PD reporters would know that Sherrod represented all or part of Medina County from 1992 to 2006 before being elected to the Senate. Consequently, they may not have thought that it represented a political trend.

All that is true, but it doesn't totally explain why every state-wide Democrat running for a partisan office carried Medina County except for Barbara Sykes, who ran for State Auditor. You can explain away Brown and Strickland by pointing out that Brown's connection to Medina County and Strickland having a wing-nut for an opponent. Explaining away the Cordray and Dann victories, however, is much harder.

All this is not to say that MCDAC expects Medina County to go Democrat in the presidential campaign next year. It is to say that we expect that Medina County will be competitive and could be carried by the right Democratic candidate.

Should Governor Strickland Have Vetoed the Stripper Bill?

The Cleveland Plain Dealer ran an editorial criticizing Governor Strickland for allowing the stripper bill to become law without his signature. The editorial appeared in the Monday, May 28, 2007 edition of the Plain Dealer. Although Strickland said that he would have voted against the bill if he had been in the General Assembly, he wasn't going to veto it.

The PD feels otherwise. Jill of Writes Like She Talks agrees with the PD. She points out in one of her blog entries that Ohio will have to spend taxpayer dollars defending a bill in the Federal Courts that will most likely be struck down as unconstitutional. The issue of attorney fees isn't, by the way, a small matter. If a person brings a lawsuit under 42 USC 1983 because his or her civil rights have been violated, they are entitled to attorney fees if successful.

The counter-argument in favor of Strickland's veto would be that he needs to have some co-operation with the General Assembly and fighting over this bill, a fight that he probably won't win, is simply not worth it. It is very possible that Strickland and the General Assembly could be heading for some fights over potential Strickland line item vetoes in the state's budget bill. The question is whether such political capital, to use a term our President is fond of, should be used in this fashion.

One thing that Strickland has going for him is that voters, so far, approve of his performance in office. His popularity is going to go down over the next several months. If he is constantly seen as vetoing legislation passed by the General Assembly, especially if he is not upheld in that veto, he could be seen as weak and ineffectual.

We are interested in your opinion, please tell us what you think by leaving a comment on this entry.

Cross-posted at www.medinacountycommonsense.com.

Does the Internet Move Voters or the People who Move the Voters?

If you click on the link in this entry's title, you will read a post by Jill Miller Zimon who has the blog Write Likes She Talks. In the post, she linked to a report from the Milwaukee Journal-Senteniel about the use of the internet in politics. In the comments section, we left the comment that while we don't see the internet as moving the average voter, we see it as a tool that will move the people who move the voters.

Here's what we mean by that: people obsessed by politics are like any other group of obsessives, they are relatively small in number. Most people don't really pay attention to politics near as much as those of us who blog about politics, or who donate to politicians, or who volunteer for campaigns. We are, by definition, fanatics. This is why we pay a lot of attention to what happens online.

It isn't the average voter, however, who is reading all the political news on the internet or combing through the blogs. It is the people who are, for want of a better term, "activists" or, as stated above, fanatics, who are using the internet to organize politically and advance ideas on the web. This is not to say that voters who aren't so fanatical about politics won't use the internet to get information. They do, and they will, and tools such as campaign websites and news media websites will be more and more important for such voters.

Which brings us back to our original idea that we put on Writes Likes She Talks. The power of the internet isn't to move the average voter. The power of the internet is to help move the people who help move the average voters.

That power, of course, is what makes it so dangerous to the mainstream media. The internet totally changes the power relationship between the reader and the provider of political information. It used to be that it was impossible to organize without using mail, or phone, or newspapers, or electronic media. As a result, political organization was relatively expensive for the average person. It was relatively expensive for the unorganized to become organized.

Now you can organize by creating and hosting a blog, or by email, or by using a website, or posting a video on You Tube. As broadband increases in popularity and becomes cheaper, as it will, the ability to use the internet to organize politically will become even more important.

People who concentrate just on the numbers of people who use the internet to get political information are missing the point. The point is not just the number of people, it is also the type of people.