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I (Ben) am still on a Jimmy Carter kick*, and one of the supporting characters in last week’s review of “What The Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?” was James Fallows. Fallows was a speechwriter for Carter before leaving the White House and writing a devastating profile of his former boss in The Atlantic entitled “The Passionless Presidency.” He’s also the author of Breaking The News, which is not a new book (it was published in 1996) though it’s still a relevant one. I finished it today. I also read this post from The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle entitled “The Presidents We Love To Hate.” In it she implicates the media for the downward trend in presidents’ six-month approval ratings as well as the erosion of the public’s respect for the office of the presidency. This dovetails with some of what Fallows says in Breaking The News. So let’s dive in.

McArdle acknowledges the common (and tired) critique from some that “the liberal media” is partly responsible for the downward trend in the approval ratings, although her argument is not just counter-intuitive but a bit strange. She says:

That media had high hopes for Democrats, and didn’t much like Republicans.  So all Republicans had to do was, like, not invade Poland, and their approval ratings rose.  The expectations for Carter and Clinton were higher, and therefore their ratings fell.

This doesn’t hold much water for me, although it feels like a half-hearted argument compared to McArdle’s other, sturdier contention that “the pre-Nixon presidents enjoyed a certain media conspiracy of silence. They were treated with a fair amount of deference, which is why the public didn’t know about FDR’s wheelchair, or JFK’s affairs. Post Nixon, they started being a little more aggressive, so approval ratings became more volatile.” She adds,

And the more information we have [about presidents]–the more time we spend watching them give bad speeches and make embarrassing gaffes–the faster our approval falls. I suspect that emotionally, we actually prefer that the Great Oz stay behind the curtain, so we could content ourselves with the occasional ceremonial display. But those days are long gone.

That seems more right, if not exactly right. It’s also an argument Fallows might agree with.

Fallows quickly dispenses with the liberal/conservative paradigm and focuses on deeper media biases: toward moneyed and corporate interests; toward a status quo of access and privilege with the elite they cover (inside and outside of Washington); toward blurring the line between “news” and “entertainment”; and toward an abdication of responsibility to present accurate information rather than perpetuate misinformation. To wit:

Mainstream journalism has fallen into the habit of portraying public life as a race to the bottom, in which one group of conniving, insincere politicians ceaselessly tries to outmaneuver another. The great problem for American democracy in the 1990s is that people barely trust elected leaders or the entire legislative system to accomplish anything of value. … Issues that affect the collective interests of Americans — crime, health care, education, economic growth — are presented mainly as arenas in which politicians can fight. … Far from making it easier to cope with public challenges, the media often make it harder. … They increasingly present public life mainly as a depressing spectacle, rather than a vital activity in which citizens can and should be engaged. The implied message of this approach is that people will pay attention only if politics can be made as interesting as the other entertainment options available to them, from celebrity scandals to the human melodramas featured on daytime talk programs. In attempting to compete head-to-head with pure entertainment programs, the “serious” press locks itself into a competition it cannot win.

This lines up nicely with Mr. Masterson’s comment last week. He places blame with the politicians (and certainly blame always rests there), but he also acknowledges that when it comes to tit-for-tat controversy and political squabbling, “the media eats it up.”

Fallows uses an example from the 1992 campaign to illustrate the difference between what the media considers important and what the public does. On January 31, 1995, Bill Clinton delivered a State of the Union address to the newly Republican-controlled Congress (which surged into power behind Newt Gingrich and his “Contract With America”). Four days after the speech he held a public forum in Boston and took questions from teenagers. They asked seven, all of which focussed on the practical impact of Clinton’s programs on their schools and neighborhoods. One question was, “We need stronger laws to punish those people who are caught selling guns to our youth. Basically, what can you do about that?” Another: “Programs designed to keep teenagers away from drugs and gangs often emphasize sports and seem geared mainly to boys. How could such programs be made more attractive to teenaged girls?”

Fallows contrasts these questions to the ones network anchors asked Clinton in contemporaneous interviews. “There was no overlap whatsoever between the questions the students asked and those raised by the anchors,” Fallows writes. Peter Jennings, Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw all asked Clinton questions about “the pure game of politics” — how Clinton felt about being “eclipsed” by Gingrich and Bob Dole, or the scandals of Whitewater and Vince Foster, or whether or not Republicans “play fair.”

“Journalists justify their intrusiveness and excesses by claiming that they are the public’s representatives,” Fallows says. “In fact they ask questions no one but their fellow political professionals cares about. And they often do so with a discourtesy and rancor, as at the typical White House news conference, that represents the public’s views much less than it reflects the modern journalist’s belief that being independent boils down to acting hostile.”

Fallows also devotes a chunk of the book to dissecting Clinton’s failed health care reform and considers what role the media played, for better or worse (mostly worse), in its demise. He lodges a minority report, bucking conventional wisdom that the White House stiff-armed Congress by suggesting that its real misstep was stiff-arming the media. What he most laments is the lack of an informed civic debate, charging the media with perpetuating disinformation.

Speaking of which, am I the only one who gets more, not less, confused about the competing health care proposals the more I read about them? And am I the only one who feels a foreboding sense of déjà vu when Fallows writes about citizens shouting “the government should keep its hands off my Medicare” at town hall meetings fifteen years ago?

Likewise with the resurgence of Elizabeth “Betsy” McCaughey, who, in Fallows’ eyes, is perfectly cast for the role of “Villain” in the health care debates. He accuses McCaughey of writing op-eds riddled with “schoolboy-howler errors that make many journalists sit up nights worrying, ‘What if someone sees that I misunderstood the bill?’” You may recognize McCaughey from her recent appearance on “The Daily Show,” which Fallows had some choice words about.

Lest this post get any wonkier, I’ll say that Breaking The News is well worth the read. It’s a jeremiad, to be sure, but Fallows writes from within the world of journalism as someone who believes reform is possible. He devotes most of the final chapter to advocating “civic journalism.” He also cites Jay Rosen, whose blog “PressThink” features much of the same sharp commentary on all things media. Rosen’s most well-known (and controversial) post is this one about how the Internet weakens the authority of the press. (He says this is a good thing. I think he makes a convincing case.)

Given the traction we gained from last week’s discussion of the Jimmy Carter book, you’re encouraged to chime in with thoughts or contrary opinions. In fact, let’s dust off the old poll feature on WordPress and give that a go!

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* = Yes, this is a bizarre statement to make when your first name is not Rosalynn.

Last week’s revelations from the declassification of the Interrogation Memos – though we should call them what they are, which are Torture Memos — have triggered a justifiable uproar. But what’s hypocritical about many of the reactions this week — from media commentators as well as politicians across the spectrum — is that none of this should have been a surprise. One reason it shouldn’t have been is because of a book Jane Mayer wrote last year called The Dark Side, based on her meticulous reporting for The New Yorker. Anyone in Washington who pretends to be surprised that harsh interrogation techniques were authorized at the highest levels of our government has willfully not been paying attention.

That the Justice Department authorized making these documents public is a testament to open government. There are valid concerns from those, especially within the C.I.A., who opposed declassification. But none of those concerns trumped the fact that releasing these memos meant we could finally stop lying to ourselves that we don’t torture. We have tortured. Mayer documents it in brutal detail: Abu Zubaydah, the first major Qaeda figure captured by our military, was waterboarded as often as ten times a week, and up to three times a day. Prisoners were subjected to extreme heat and cold, irregular and insufficient periods of sleep, confined spaces, no bathroom breaks and constant threats and humiliation. As Atul Gawande wrote in The New Yorker several weeks ago, there is a strong case to be made that solitary confinement itself is torture.

President Obama has done far more right than wrong in his handling of this issue. On day two of his presidency he revoked all legal opinions on interrogation and ordered that the C.I.A.’s secret prisons be closed. And had he not been behind the push to release these memos, they certainly would not have been released. But Obama also weighed in on a decision that was not his to make: whether or not to pursue criminal investigations against the people who authorized these techniques as well as the people who carried them out. That authority lies with the Attorney General and the Justice Department itself, which in principle should function independently of any political persuasion. 

Being against torture shouldn’t be a partisan issue. It should be an American issue. It’s sad to think it must even be a debate. Arguments in defense of the enhanced interrogation have claimed that it did indeed produce intelligence that saved lives. This may in fact be true. The people making this claim have demanded that Obama deauthorize other memos that they say will vindicate their argument. But what is also true, and what Mayer (very persuasively) shows, is that not torturing produced intelligence that saved lives.* It is also true, according to Mayer, that torture produced evidence that was simply wrong — as Sheikh Ibn al-Libi confessed, saying he gave a fabricated confession simply to stop being tortured — and that this evidence was used to drum up congressional authorization of the Iraq War.

Mayer quotes Arthur Schlesinger Jr. a “liberal Democrat but also an admirer of muscular foreign policy,” as saying of our country’s authorization of enhanced interrogation techniques, “No position taken has done more damage to the American reputation in the world — ever.” 

Repentance means “to turn around”; in the Christian practice, repentance involves an admission of guilt followed by a dedication to atone for one’s wrongs. Our country has stumbled to an admission of guilt with regard to torture, but what we apparently lack the political will to do is turn around, to amend and change ourselves. Can atonement happen without holding anyone accountable? As any recovered alcoholic can tell you, step four is to make “a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.” In this, we are still searching for our fearlessness.

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The Dark Side comes out in paperback (with a new afterword) on May 5.

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* Ali Soufan, who turns up in The Dark Side and as a hero in Lawrence Wright’s excellent The Looming Tower, makes the same point in an op-ed in Wednesday’s Times. Soufan argues from firsthand experience that traditional interrogation techniques — i.e., not torture — were working with Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. A former F.B.I. agent who talked directly with Zubaydah, Soufan praises the release of the memos but says that prosecuting C.I.A. officials for following orders would be a mistake.

UPDATE: Soufan is profiled in this week’s Newsweek.

We found this letter stashed beside Scooter Thomas’s litterbox yesterday. The penmanship was rather crude and it was written in crayon. We are publishing it here in its original, unedited form.

Dear President-Elect Obama,

You have publicly stated that you and your lovely wife are rewarding your beautiful daughters with an abominable creature a puppy once you move into the White House. I am writing this letter in the hope you wise up reconsider selecting an animal of such an inferior species questionable pedigree. (I mean no ill will toward my basset hound friend, Winnie Sweeney. She is decidedly less inferior than all most canines.) Specifically I am writing to suggest that you drop this futile search for a not totally imbecilic worthy dog and choose a kick-ass truly superior specimen. I am thinking here of myself.

Let me tell you a little bit about me. I’m eighteen pounds but quite limber. I think of myself as an intellectual like you. While I won’t pretend we share the same political views (I voted for the vastly better candidate Mr. Bob Barr), I am an open-minded, occasionally progressive feline tolerant of people who are simply wrong a great many viewpoints. I like red wine and Prokofiev and naps and the Bravo channel. 

You have stressed that the First Pet must be hypoallergenic given your daughter Malia’s allergies. I must confess that I may not be a prime candidate in this regard though your daughter is clearly a wuss. I landed with my current owners, neanderthals in taste and culture a good-natured but feckless couple, because my original owner had to take allergy shots just to coexist with me. Rest assured that I could stop shedding at a moment’s notice, however, if I freakin’ have to in a true spirit of bipartisanship. For the time being, I continue to shed prolifically only to embarrass my owners by sending them into public with heavily shedded-upon shirts and jackets. (They need to be taken down a notch or twelve two.)

Perhaps you are also concerned about my mammoth purported barfing spells. I cannot emphasize just how true false these are. You know how the braindead MSM chattering classes are once they wrap their bejeweled claws hands around a juicy morsel of gossip. You’re a Muslim! I’m a vomiting menace! How absurd.

You and I are both alike in this way, sir, in that we both smoke have suffered the slings and arrows of our rivals yet emerged unscathed, even stronger as a result. Of course, I would be happy to retch in the general direction of any media barnacles nettlesome journalists such as, say, David Gregory or Helen Thomas. Just say the word.

Finally, you signified your allegiance to a shelter animal because it would be “a mutt like me.” Sir, I am the muttiest cat to ever walk saunter the earth. My father was an alley cat Scandinavian and my mother loose Inuit. I am part rabid Cherokee and one-eighth Australian. You and I are going to take over the world truly global children. Polyglot blood courses through our veins. (FYI, I speak cat French, Spanish, German, pidgin Portugese, Japanese and Sanskrit.) 

Please consider me in the coming days and weeks as you slack around until January transition into your new role and amass a bunch of wonkish dweebs “team of rivals” to complement your presidency. Also, I can give some nasty scratch marks fantastic economic advice and I used to be not-neutered a foreign policy scholar at the Cato Institute. So it’s like win-win!

Give Michelle a smooch squeeze hug for me.

Respectfully,

Scooter Thomas

P.S. I’m a great alarm clock. I am willing to sit on your head and purr like a bulldozer nudge you gently for that three a.m. phone call.

We both grew up in families that didn’t wear their politics on their sleeves. We have also been blessed with friends across the political spectrum. We especially value those friendships with people who don’t vote the same way we do, but who love us anyway. (One friend is fond of the saying, “When all think alike, not much thinking going on.”) For those reasons and others, we made a conscious decision on this blog not to dip our toes too deep into the political waters. That said, it would be disingenuous to pretend that we didn’t wake up this morning elated by what took place yesterday. Like most people, we had no idea a guy named Barack Obama existed until his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Convention. After a dispiriting election in 2004, Ben bought Erin Dreams From My Father as a Christmas gift that year and inscribed it, “Here’s to 2005.” We’ve always been partial to Obama in large part because he’s a fantastic writer. His memoir is free of the kind of deadening, cautionary, self-calculating language that most politicians resort to in their books. Yet even when we read it then, there is no way we could have predicted what took place last night in Grant Park. And what took place! How often do we know we’re watching history as it unfolds? (When we tell the grandkids, we may exaggerate and say we were actually there. Forgive us! We wanted to be!) The temptation will be to hold on to those images forever, to pine for them the first time President Obama faces backlash from within his own party or makes a mistake or missteps politically or says something that gets him in hot water. That’s going to happen. He’s human. But that’s what we found reassuring about how subdued he seemed when he walked out to the podium last night. He looked like a man who knows how monumental the challenges ahead will be. Tonight is the answer, Obama said, to those who doubt that in America anything is possible, the answer “that led those who’ve been told for so long by so many to be cynical and fearful and doubtful about what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.” For once, a leader was telling us that there will be hard work and sacrifice needed. And so the bending goes on.

Thanks to all who participated in the first Voreblog Readers Poll. (It was a nice round number of twenty, although some abstained from answering all of the questions. Apparently the Jeremy Piven question may have been too personal for some.) We invite ABC’s George Stephanopoulos to analyze the results with us.

The results are in. George breaks it down for us. On a black telephone.

Question #1. Who is your favorite member of Voreblog?

1. Scooter Thomas (55%)
2. Vincent D’Onofrio (20%)
3. Erin Vore (15%)
4. Ben Vore (5%)

Stephanopoulos: “Clearly, the people who read this blog do not do so because they particularly care for the Vores. I suspect they’re a rather disreputable pair with poor hygiene and negligent social skills. Scooter Thomas usually polls well no matter what. Voters like lethargic, chunky, disheveled-looking creatures who can be slightly condescending and have the ability to type. Hence Vincent D’Onofrio polling well too.”

2. Is Jeremy Piven a jerk or what?

1. Absolutely (63%)
2. Some of the time (21%)
3. Stop slandering his good, BW3-shillin’ name (11%)
4. No opinion (5%)

Stephanopoulos: “The results suggest that most of the Voreblog readership 1) hails from Cincinnati; 2) was once a Cincinnati Bell customer; 3) got food poisoning at BW3s; or 4) worked with Jeremy Piven during a commercial shoot. I couldn’t stand those interminable spots. Why does America passively accept such smug media personalities? I can’t fathom what the life of a slick, well-coiffed and conceited talking head is like. No idea. None.”

3. Harsh accusations have recently been leveled against Scooter Thomas. Do you:

1. Find them to be scurrilous attacks impugning his character (40%)
2. Agree with the substance of the charges and find Scooter Thomas to be a preening, snobbish toad (30%)
3. Just wish the candidates would talk about the issues (30%)

Stephanopoulos: “Again, people love Scooter Thomas, although a significant number of respondents point toward a potential Scooter Thomas backlash should he become further embroiled in scandal. I’ve heard whispers of voter fraud, though, coming from some shadowy special interest groups loosely affiliated with Mindless Comfort. I’d also note the craving for a more serious, substantive campaign this year, not just tit-for-tat and lipstick-on-a-pig and who-can-drink-a-gallon-of-milk-in-an-hour.”

4. The best TV show that the Vores watch and blog about is:

Now that power has returned to the Vore residence, Voreblog turns its attention to others in the tri-state area still in need and examines the blackout fallout. Today: Spoiled food.

SCENE: The Vore’s kitchen.

[BEN and ERIN open the fridge for the first time since the power came back on.]

ERIN: All right, time to start from scratch. [She opens freezer.]

TWIN SIX-POUND BAGS OF COSTCO STRAWBERRIES (in unison): Hi guys! No need to throw us out! We stayed plenty cold!

BEN: I don’t believe them.

ERIN: If we keep them, we’re going to continue arguing about how we ended up with two bags in the first place. I’m not going down that path again.

STRAWBERRIES: But we’ve been in here so long that we were basically just freezer burn until the power went out. Now we’ve defrosted back to delicious, harmless Costco strawberries!

BEN: I still don’t believe them.

ERIN: In the trash you go.

STRAWBERRIES [plummeting through air]: Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

[Scene.]

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[Health inspector Dale Grigsby] advised consumers heading to restaurants and stores that were closed during the power outage to ask staff how they handled spoiled food.  – “Spoiled food a menace,” Cincinnati.com

SCENE: LaRosa’s Restaurant.

[BEN and ERIN are led to a corner booth by MICHELLE, a waitress.]

MICHELLE: Here are some menus for you to look over. Can I get you started with something to drink?

ERIN: Actually, we were curious how you handled your spoiled food during the power outage.

MICHELLE: Oh, sure! Everyone has been asking us about that. You don’t have anything to worry about.

BEN: You didn’t really answer the question.

MICHELLE: Excuse me?

ERIN: My husband’s right. You sort of dodged the question. I asked how you handled your spoiled food.

MICHELLE: Well, let me assure you we took all the necessary precautions.

BEN: Does LaRosa’s have a written policy on disposal of spoiled food?

ERIN: And may we see a copy before we order?

MICHELLE: I, uh, assure you we serve only the freshest, highest quality ingredients–

BEN: I asked about a written policy though.

MICHELLE: Well, to the best of my knowledge we don’t, but trust me –

ERIN: Michelle, we’ll tell you where trust got us. We just went to Krogers and Jim in the deli assured us the potato salad was fine, so we took his word on it and bought it and went home and put it in the fridge. Then, a few hours later, we opened up the fridge and lo and behold–

BEN: –the potato salad was holding up the ketchup with a gun!

ERIN: Do you get it?

BEN: The potato salad went bad.

ERIN: It’s our favorite Far Side cartoon!

BEN: We laugh every time!

MICHELLE: (speechless)

ERIN: I’ll start with a Coke.

BEN: Same for me. Thanks, Michelle.

[Scene.]

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[SCENE: The first presidential debate. JIM LEHRER is moderating. JOHN MCCAIN and BARACK OBAMA are onstage.]

LEHRER: Now, my final question for the evening. What is the number one menace facing our country today — terrorism, Al-Qaeda, nuclear proliferation, climate change — and how would your presidency address it? Senator Obama, you first.

OBAMA: Jim, with all due respect, while the items you ticked off just now are serious threats to our short and long term national security, I would have to say that the number one menace we face today is spoiled food.

MCCAIN: And I don’t mean to interrupt my Senate colleague, but I whole-heartedly agree. Please, Barack, continue.

OBAMA: Thank you, Senator. Some politicans might use the words “annoyance” or “inconvenience” to describe this epidemic, felt recently in such heartland cities as Galveston, Houston, Chicago and Cincinnati. But I respectfully disagree. Spoiled food is a menace. We must gauge our response accordingly.

MCCAIN: I agree with everything Senator Obama just said. I would like to add that I would follow spoiled food to the gates of hell.

OBAMA: I might consider negotiating with spoiled food without precondition so long as it would not concede any issues that are in our long term national security interest.

MCCAIN: I might quibble with the Senator’s wording there, but we’re basically in agreement: Spoiled food should not be taken lightly.

OBAMA: Agreed.

MCCAIN: Strongly agreed.

OBAMA: On this we agree.

MCCAIN: Hear hear.

LEHRER: I quit.

[Scene.]

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If the power comes back on a weekend, that could be difficult, since the inspectors work Monday through Friday, [Grigsby] said. — Cincinnati.com

SCENE: DALE GRIGSBY’s living room.

[DALE is sitting in his favorite comfy chair with chips and a beer. His alma mater, Ohio State, is on television.]

[The phone rings.]

DALE: Dadgummit. [picks up phone] Hello? Yeah, hey Jim, what’s up? A food emergency? In Indian Hill? Well, I’m glad the power’s back on but it’s Saturday, Jim. I’m not inspecting nothing until Monday morning at nine-oh-clock. Well so what? You tell him it can wait until Monday. He said what? That lousy cur. Listen, Jim, I really wish I could — OH HE DROPPED IT! Criminy, Jim, the Buckeyes are on and I’m missing the game. If thousands die because of food poisoning this weekend, it’s not going to be on me, no siree. I told you, the power coming back on on a Saturday could be difficult. That’s just how it is. I’ll be reporting for duty Monday morning, but until then, don’t call me again. [DALE slams phone down.]

[Lights down. Lights up on DALE in bathrobe, leaning down to pick up his morning paper. He unfolds it and looks at the main headline above the fold: THOUSANDS DIE IN LOCAL FOOD POISONING EPIDEMIC. Close-up of DALE's face. A single tear trickles down his cheek.]

[Scene.]