The WTF? In Chief

I’ve been working on an interactive graphic for the Obama inauguration. Here’s a preview:

click to see larger version

The idea is, you get a visual representation of all of the things the new president has “on his plate” when he takes office. It might be instructive to compare his “plate” to what previous presidents had on their “plates” when they took office.

Honestly, I probably won’t get this finished by the time the inauguration rolls around (classes starting this week and all), but I might assign it to my interactive reporting class to finish up.

So the WTF in Chief idea would be to have an official appointee whose job it was to explain WTF?!?! to the American people.

Not the press secretary, but someone whose sole job is to respond to the righteous indignation of the American people about the seriously messed up state our nation is at the moment (and if you don’t think we’re in a world of doo-doo, then I don’t even want to deal with your denial of reality). Maybe that’s Obama’s job ultimately, but it might help if we had someone who could respond on a semi-regular basis to commiserate with us.

Someone whose job it would be to explain:

• WTF happened to our $350 billion in bailout money?
• WTF happened to the recovery from Hurricanes Katrina, Ike and Rita?
• WTF is going to happen to those who authorized torture at Guantanamo Bay?
• WTF is going on in Iraq?

etc. See this report from the Center for Public Integrity for a list of 128 major meltdowns in the executive branch over the last 8 years. I think you get the picture.

The idea also got me to thinking about a similar position newspapers could adopt – think of it as sort of the ombudsperson for the financial meltdown. We already have Alan Mutter doing this from the outside, and others who are content to lob information from the outside, but wouldn’t it be a good thing for some newspaper company execs to come out and lay everything on the line for their loyal readers and “stakeholders” (I hate that word)?

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For the past five days, I’ve been riveted by the media frenzy over vice presidential pick Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska. What strikes me most is the way the media – print, tv, radio, online – have rushed to fill in the details on the sketchy knowledge available about the candidate.

They say that nature abhors a vacuum. I would suggest that the media abhors a vacuum even more. Since the announcement, we’ve learned about Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy, “Troopergate,” her support for the “Bridge to Nowhere,” her husband’s involvement in the Alaska Independence Party, her lobbying for federal funds for local project, her role in a 527 for Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, and who knows what will turn up in the days to come.

Also fascinating was the Wikipedia battle that arose from the appearance of a user “YoungTrig,” who began editing Palin’s Wikipedia entry the day before the announcement. Check out this NPR story for more details on that angle.

What to make of all this? Certainly there has been a rush from both the G.O.P. and the Democrats to “define” Palin one way or the other. But the definition is hinging on the reporting of media outlets and bloggers, responding to a wide-open v.p. pick with the type of reporting you probably wouldn’t have seen had the pick been a “known quantity” like Min. Gov. Pawlenty or former presidential aspirant Mitt Romney.

It’s too soon to see what damage all these revelations might have on the McCain campaign, but it’s fascinating to watch the media in action. Naturally, the McCain campaign has complained that the media are being “vicious and scurrilous” in their Palin stories.

I don’t really see that as the case. The media are doing their job. They are retroactively vetting the McCain vice presidential pick. They did the same to a lesser extent with Joe Biden, Barack Obama’s pick. But Biden was a known entity. He’d been a presidential candidate twice, and a senator for a long time. If Obama (who has had his own taste of the media scrutiny) had picked a little-known governor from a small (population) state, he’d have witnessed the same intense scrutiny of his pick.

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Following up on the panel at AEJMC about the Internet in the 2008 political season, Garrett M. Graff explains the way Barack Obama’s text message alert about his vice presidential selection is actually a means to a larger end.

But announcing Mr. Obama’s running mate by text message has little to do with proclaiming the selection and everything to do with getting out the vote on Election Day in November. The move should add thousands — and more likely tens or hundreds of thousands — of cellphone numbers to what is already one of the most detailed political databases ever created.

A study conducted during the 2006 elections showed that text-message reminders helped increase turnout among new voters by four percentage points, at a cost of only $1.56 per vote — much cheaper than the $20 or $30 per vote that the offline work of door-to-door canvassing or phone banking costs.

It’s a shrewd way to get new contacts into a campaign database, and I suspect it’s something that more candidates will be doing in future elections. It will be interesting to see whether such TXT GOTV methods actually increase turnout by 4 percent or more. That’s a huge number in a presidential campaign, and if it’s effective, might be Obama’s tipping point.

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This summer, I taught a class at Eastern Illinois called “Freedom of Expression,” a senior seminar that dealt with the first amendment and its evolution in American judicial and political history.

Throughout the course, we had the opportunity to delve into some of the aspects of the current campaign for the U.S. presidency. One of those aspects that I found fascinating was the rise of a word in the political lexicon: dog whistle, as in “dog whistle politics.”

The use of “dog whistle” isn’t new to this campaign, but the term is relatively new, appearing (from my limited research for class) only in the late 1990s in relation to politics, and originating in the Australian political campaigns of prime minister John Howard.

Today, Melissa McEwan in the Guardian (U.K.) explains what a dog whistle is, how it works, and why it’s such a pernicious piece of political strategy. To wit:

The dog whistle piques them with something the average person won’t see as bigoted, but that the constituency for which they advocate (and/or of which they’re a part) will expect them to call out, because they instantly spy it and recognize it for what it is; they’ve heard the tune of that particular string being plucked their whole lives. Then whoever calls it out is marginalized as a hysteric, over-reactionary, looking to get offended, etc.

It’s a pretty good primer and one I’ll bookmark for any future discussions of the topic.

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