Our media at work

Personality and, hopefully, whiffs of scandal trump everything.

All that stuff about beliefs and records? They'll mention it in passing:

Capuano has compiled one of the more liberal voting records on Capitol Hill. He voted against the authorization to invade Iraq, opposed the Patriot Act, and is opposed to the death penalty. He has also been a consistent supporter of abortion rights, gay marriage, and tenants rights. [--Michael Rezendes]

But it's not important to the rest of the infotainment.

Coakley takes a chance

Martha Coakley is a very careful politician. For years, it has been tough to get her to make definitive statements about most issues of the day (and that's why I support Mike Capuano - no such difficulty there).

So I find it odd that she has stuck her neck out to choose that public funding of abortion is more important than all of health care reform. She's not choosing not abortion rights. She's opting for funding or no public option, no forcing of insurance companies to do right, no attempt at universal coverage. The House bill is far from perfect, but it has a lot of value.

I really would have expected her to waffle on this, since it's definitely an issue that Democratic primary voters will vote on, and she's already the frontrunner - in perception, at least. Instead, she has put herself in a position with little wiggle room for later.

This reminds me a little of Shannon O'Brien's ill-fated campaign for governor in 2002. At the time, Mitt Romney supported abortion rights (such a short time ago!), and O'Brien apparently thought that should be her issue. She tried to open up some space between their positions by advocating the rational position that the age of consent for abortion should be the same as the age of consent for sex, and it backfired very badly on her. I think it cost her a very close election.

Now Coakley seems to be trying the same thing. I not only disagree with it. I think it's bad politics.

The usual suspects

Let's hope that readers only read till the jump. The first part of this is pretty much on target. The base (e.g. me) is outraged at the Washington Democrats' willingness to compromise pretty much everything away. How is it that the Republicans can stop anything they want in the minority while the Democratic majority can't stop a leaky faucet?

I'm sorry, but nothing positive is going to come of the next year and a half. Pelosi and Reid aren't going to have great legislative accomplishments to point to. Duh! Anyone who has ever watched the Republicans bargain in bad faith - the only way they negotiate - can see this. Why can't Pelosi and Reid? Restoration of habeas corpus is not going to happen.

What to do then in the sixteen long months before Duhbya and hopefully a whole bunch of other Republicans have gone the way of the dodo? Politics!

• Turn over every rock in the executive branch.
• Force the Republicans to filibuster publicly. Every time they block a good idea privately they win. Show the voters that they are working against the national interest.
• Block any judicial appointment to the right of Stephen Breyer.
• Hit the media every day with messages that separate us from the GOP.
  

In other words, don't think that politics means exclusively fund-raising.

The bad part of this article is the insinuation of Republican talking points into the dominant media narrative. I'm so f---ing tired of hearing Stephen Hess and Stuart Rothenberg tell me all the things that the Democrats are not going to be able to do. Boo-hoo, the Dems won't be able cure the common cold! You don't see that narrative about the Republicans until they actually leave office - and still Tom DeLay and Newt Gingrich and even the old fossil Alan Simpson keep showing up on TV.

Part of the problem is the Dems themselves. Michael Capuano, a good liberal, nonetheless objects to the "Petraeus" report, not because the damn White House is writing it, but because Petraeus himself supported the escalation. C'mon, guys, get it straight. When the other guy is not credible, you have to kill his credibility.

Gripe, gripe, gripe

What could go wrong with a beautiful cable stay bridge if the anchor plates warp? I don't think we want to find out some February during a nor'easter.

What I definitely do not want is bland reassurances from public officials. If Bernard Cohen and Michael Capuano want to reassure me, they'll give me facts that reassure me, not just words.

I also don't want he-said, she-said, dueling-report stories from the press. There are actual facts out there somewhere, even if they're not in the reports themselves. Here are a few critical questions the reporter should have asked:

• What tests (x-rays, ultrasound, whatever) did Wiss Janney perform to reassure themselves and the state Department of Transportation that the warping they found is safe? (Today's follow-up story suggests that they didn't perform any tests, that they simply noted the proximity of warping to welds and excused it because of that.)
• Did the state deploy any instruments to determine whether the warping is getting worse, particularly in light of the fact that the number of known warped plates has grown from three to six? If not, why (the hell) not?
• What record-keeping and reinspection is the state doing to monitor the scope of the warping?
  

"I don't know," might have been the answer, but even that presumably temporary ignorance would inform me, the reader, enough to make my own judgement instead of guessing whose report is correct.

With all this said, it appears that the main disagreement is how fast to progress the investigation. Capuano was asking the right questions, and Cohen, despite what sounds like a bureaucrat's instinct to minimize problems, seems to be following up. But I'm a grown-up; give me the straight story.

Of course, the press doesn't ever print all of an interview, even in an interview format. The public officials may have said what I want to hear.

For those who've never been interviewed or who like to talk (me, most politicians, Tom Hanks in You've Got Mail), the cardinal rule of message control with the press is: Have your message ready, deliver your message, and then put the rest of the conversation off the record. (Gets you out of the interview quicker, too!)

In this case, I would have said, "We think our engineering report is right, but we take these questions seriously, and we will stay on top of the structural health of the bridge so that it's never an immediate risk." Or, better, "X-ray crystallography shows that the warps occurred during welding on the first three plates. We'll be performing similar tests on the latter three, as well as repeating the tests on the first set to see if there has been any further warping."