12 of 13 Top Slate Editors For Gore; Gumbel Baffled Gore Not Way Ahead; Rather Pre-Released His Spin
-- Back to today's CyberAlert
1) 92 percent of people in
editorial/news positions at a major Web site planned to vote for Gore, not one
for Bush. Amongst the Gore backers at Slate.com: Veterans of Newsweek, U.S.
News and the Washington Post. Slate is challenging other journalists to also
come clean.
2) Bryant Gumbel was baffled this morning by why Gore, a
"better qualified and more experienced" candidate is not way ahead
given the "unparalleled prosperity."
3) Dan Rather revealed the spin he plans to relay. If Bush
loses it's because he picked Cheney. If Gore loses it's because he
didn't wrap himself around Clinton when "policies initiated in the
Clinton White House helped to produce the greatest economic boom in U.S.
history."
1
A
media outlet has had the courage to showcase how nearly 100 percent of its
senior editorial staff planned to vote for Al Gore. Specifically, 12 of 13
people holding positions above copy editor or editorial assistant, though
those lower-lever people were also near-universally in support of Gore. And
the 13th guy isn't behind Bush: He's for libertarian Harry Browne.
The voting preferences have been posted by Slate.com
about its staff and amongst those boasting support for Gore were Timothy Noah,
a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and U.S. News &
World Report and one-time Newsweek reporter Jacob Weisberg.
Noah admitted he's a Democrat and argued: "Bush's
toxic mixture of privilege, ignorance, and resentment strikes me as far more
offensive than Gore's woodenness and occasional condescension." Weisberg
denounced Bush: "A Bush presidency might not be a disaster, but it would
surely be an embarrassment."
Overall, 76 percent (29) of the 38 Slate.com staff
members who agreed to reveal for whom they planned to pull the lever,
including contributors and business-side staff, listed Gore as their
candidate, 10.5 percent (4) picked Bush, 8 percent (3) supported Nader and 5
percent (2) advocated Browne.
(All of this raises the question of why conservatives
care if the Justice Department harasses Microsoft a bit when virtually the
entire staff of the news and commentary site, created and funded by Microsoft,
support Gore or Nader, candidates in favor of the very suit against their
company.)
In alphabetical order, here's the list of the 13 top
editorial staff members and for whom they plan to vote:
Michael Brus, Assistant Editor: Al Gore
Josh Daniel, Managing Editor: Gore
Jodi Kantor, Associate Editor: Gore
Michael Kinsley, Editor: Gore
Timothy Noah, Senior Writer: Gore
David Plotz, Washington Bureau Chief: Gore
William Saletan, Senior Writer: Gore
Jack Shafer, Deputy Editor: Browne
Scott Shuger, Senior Writer: Gore
Judith Shulevitz, New York Editor: Gore
June Thomas, Copy Chief: Gore
Eliza Truitt, Associate Editor: Gore
Jacob Weisberg, Chief Political Correspondent: Gore
Every participant listed
their reasoning. Here it is for four of them:
-- Washington Bureau Chief David Plotz offered four
reasons for why Gore got his vote:
"1) The
prospect of Gore negotiating with the Russians or Chinese is reassuring.
The prospect of Bush doing it: terrifying.
"2) The
Clinton-Gore administration has made America more prosperous, more secure,
and more tolerant than it's ever been. Gore has the good sense to continue
these policies.
"3) A point of
personal prejudice. The Bush camp impugns Gore's trustworthiness and
decency. But anyone who raises a child as smart, modest, and good-hearted
as Karenna Gore Schiff has more than enough character to be President.
"4)
'Grecians.'"
-- Senior Writer Timothy Noah, who reported for the
Wall Street Journal, Newsweek and U.S. News during the 1990s, proclaimed:
"I voted for
Gore. I can't pretend that this resulted from much mental agonizing. I'm a
Democrat, and I almost always vote for the Democrat. However, I can say
that my vote for Gore was more than the usual party-line pulling of the
lever. I think Gore is nearly as smart in the realm of governance as he is
stupid in the realm of campaigning. The Gore who wrote Earth in the
Balance and presided over seminars on the decline of metaphor in American
life embarrasses me. But the Gore who headed up the 'Reinventing
Government' task force; who imposed some discipline on Clinton during
the early, chaotic years of his administration (see Bob Woodward's The
Agenda); and who dreamed up the Midgetman missile during the 1980s as an
alternative to the MX, has the makings of an excellent President.
"My vote for
Gore must also be counted as an affirmative vote against Bush, who lacks
sufficient experience for the job. It may be rash of me to write of
personal impressions, since I've met Gore but have never encountered Bush
face to face. From a distance, though, Bush's toxic mixture of privilege,
ignorance, and resentment strikes me as far more offensive than Gore's
woodenness and occasional condescension. I really can't stand Bush, even
though he's supposed to be the more likable candidate. I actually do like
Gore (though I've been told that, based on what I've written, he doesn't
much care for me)."
-- Chief Political Correspondent Jacob Weisberg, who
toiled for Newsweek in the late 1980s, contended:
"When the race
was getting started, I said I expected to be annoyed by everything Gore
did in the campaign and then vote for him anyway. He's held up his end of
the bargain, and I intend to hold up mine. As a politician, Gore is nearly
talentless. As a President, however, I think he would be likely to build
on Bill Clinton's most important accomplishments, hewing to a path of
fiscal responsibility while pursuing a measured federal activism that
would help rebuild public trust in government. In some respects, I think
Gore could be better than Clinton. He is more engaged by foreign policy
and a more principled internationalist. Gore's sophistication about
environmental and technology issues is a significant plus.
"As for Bush,
Christopher Hitchens summed up my view perfectly when he described him as
'unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate,
fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite
proud of all these things.' A Bush presidency might not be a disaster,
but it would surely be an embarrassment."
-- Marjorie Williams, a Slate contributor, so not
included in my list of 13 top editors, was nonetheless a Washington Post
reporter until recently. Her reasoning:
"I plan to vote
for Al Gore. 1) Because I'm a Democrat, and while I can theoretically
imagine voting for a Republican candidate for President, I never have;
George W. Bush doesn't seem like a good reason to start.
"2) Because at
heart, between re-inventions, Gore is and always has been a moderate,
centrist sort of Democrat. I can't think of a major policy area in which I
disagree strongly with what I take to be his core inclinations.
"3) Because I
think he'd make a good President in every realm except the admittedly
important one of persuasion. Reports of Gore's record within the Clinton
administration suggest an impressively tough-minded guy who understands
the presidency and is even prepared to take appropriate risks with his
political capital. The worry about Gore, obviously, is that over time we
will find him as abrasive and phony in the bully pulpit as he has seemed
in this campaign-which matters not because it's the President's job to
please or entertain us but because it's human nature to resist sacrificing
or doing something difficult on the say-so of someone we'd like to stuff
in a locker. It still beats the alternative, in my view, of having as
President a man who seems as intellectually incurious as Bush."
To see the entire Slate.com list of staff responses,
go to:
http://slate.msn.com/Features/howvote/howvote.asp
In an accompanying piece, Slate Editor Michael
Kinsley argued:
"But -- for the
millionth time! -- an opinion is not a bias! The fact that reporters tend
to be liberal says nothing one way or another about their tendency to be
biased. It does suggest that when political bias does creep in, it is more
likely to tilt liberal than conservative. But there are so many other
pressures and prejudices built into the news -- including occasional
overcompensation for fear of appearing biased-that raw political bias
plays a fairly small role. And any liberal bias in reporting is more than
counterbalanced by the conservative tilt of the commentariat. Or so I
believe.
"Of course it
is not easy to persuade folks of this, and many will never believe it. No
doubt it is easier just to keep your political opinions secret and imply
that you don't have any. But that absurdity or dishonesty itself
undermines your credibility. Or it ought to."
For the rest of Kinsley's piece, go to:
http://slate.msn.com/Readme/00-11-06/Readme.asp
Slate's Deputy Editor, Jack Shafer, the one of the
13 who doesn't support Gore but Browne, urged journalists at other
outlets to also come clean and he offered a list of journalists he planned
to contact to request that they reveal for whom they voted. He predicted
the obvious:
"I also have a
hypothesis about how the survey will turn out if people answer and answer
honestly. It will confirm that the press corps is over-represented by
yellow dog...well, golden ocher Democrats. Most of them are for abortion
rights, against school vouchers, for government regulation, against
drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, for national health care,
against unlimited money in campaigns, for gun control, against privatizing
Social Security, for higher taxes. In a word, for Al Gore. I tested my
Democratic thesis several years ago by checking the public record to see
how a sample of top Washington Posties had registered to vote. Almost to a
one, registered Democratic. One Postie explained away the embarrassment of
his Republican status this way: He and his wife wanted all the Republican
and Democratic campaign literature mailed to them, so each year they
tossed a coin to settle who'd register Republican and who'd register
Democratic. That year he lost the toss."
To view the list of the people Shafer will "be
contacting in the next 24 hours," meaning today, "to ask how
they voted," go to:
http://slate.msn.com/code/PressBox/PressBox.asp?Show=11/20/2000&
idMessage=6426
Three cheers to Slate.com for its honesty and we
wish Shafer luck, but bet virtually all will refuse to answer or claim
they don't vote.
2
Bryant
Gumbel was baffled this morning by why Gore, a "better qualified and
more experienced" candidate is not way ahead given the
"unparalleled prosperity."
MRC analyst Brian Boyd noticed that he asked Jack
Kemp on today's The Early Show on CBS: "We have a name candidate,
viewed as better qualified and more experienced, better able to handle key
issues, linked with a period of unparalleled prosperity, against a
governor with no national, no international experience. This would seem to
be a mismatch, why is it still a tight race?"
Kemp replied:
"You could make a case, as I think Reagan made in 1980 when President
Carter was running and Reagan was a governor without experience, we were
told, that the issue was how do you create prosperity, how do you bring
down inflation, how do you get the economy rolling again. And I want to
make a point though that's I think is important. This economy is slowing,
interest rates are very high, Bush has I think the issues."
Gumbel retorted:
"Jack, that's not analogous because back when Reagan was running we
had a bad economy, this one's prosperous."
3
Read
Dan Rather's spin ahead of time. The MRC's Rich Noyes alerted me to
the latest posting of "Dan Rather's Notebook" in which Rather
revealed what kind of spin he will push or relay from others after a Gore
or Bush loss.
If Bush loses, he'll pick up on blame of the
Cheney pick: "The selection of Cheney will be especially hard to
justify if Bush loses Pennsylvania and that loss is viewed as a critical
reason for his overall defeat. On the short list of those being considered
for the veep slot last summer was Tom Ridge, the popular governor of the
Keystone State. Thus it would surely be argued that with Ridge on the
ticket, Bush would have carried Pennsylvania and perhaps other
battleground states as well."
If Gore loses it will be because Gore didn't
"wrap himself" around Clinton: "But the strongest and most
severe case made by the Democratic fault-finders almost surely would
center on Gore's reluctance to wrap himself in the mantle of the
administration in which he has served for the past eight years. Almost
from the time the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, there has been an
intriguing duality in the public perception of President Clinton: Highly
negative ratings in the area of personal conduct and character, but highly
positive numbers in job performance.
"The question
that could well haunt Gore for years to come is why he chose to throw out
the baby with the bath water. Policies initiated in the Clinton White
House helped to produce the greatest economic boom in U.S. history. And
there were notable successes in other areas as well, and in many of them
Gore played an active and critical role. Should he lose, many Democrats
would never forgive him for not running vigorously on the record he helped
to build and for failing to draw a strong contrast between that record and
the one he and Bill Clinton inherited eight years ago."
To read Rather's entire piece, go to:
http://cbsnews.com/now/story/0,1597,246928-412,00.shtml
> Not sure when the next CyberAlert will be
written. Tonight I and the MRC staff will be casually watching the network
coverage, but not tracking it in detail as we go to a few parties instead. -- Brent Baker
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