Needlenose

There’s a major profile in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine of veteran Washington, D.C. reporter Mike Allen of Politico:

Allen’s e-mail tipsheet, Playbook, has become the principal early-morning document for an elite set of political and news-media thrivers and strivers. Playbook is an insider’s hodgepodge of predawn news, talking-point previews, scooplets, birthday greetings to people you’ve never heard of, random sightings (“spotted”) around town and inside jokes. It is, in essence, Allen’s morning distillation of the Nation’s Business in the form of a summer-camp newsletter.

Like many in Washington, [White House communications director Dan] Pfeiffer describes Allen with some variation on “the most powerful” or “important” journalist in the capital. The two men exchange e-mail messages about six or eight times a day.

Now, I could weigh in on all the alternately snark-worthy and/or unsettling anecdotes in the NYT’s mammoth profile of Allen, but Jason Linkins of the Huffington Post has already done so in rather devastating fashion (noting that even leaving aside the celebration of Politico’s self-conscious and self-promoting shallowness, portions of the Times piece are “like reading a David Lynch screenplay.”)

Instead, I’m interested in the (perhaps even longer) untold story of how Allen arrived at this point in life.  After all, it was only six and a half years ago that he became a well-known journalist the old-fashioned way — co-writing a story for the Washington Post that was immediately hailed as “one of the most memorable pieces of White House journalism produced in the Bush era” and was substantially responsible for the conviction of a high-ranking government official on perjury and obstruction of justice charges.

Unless you’re a hardcore junkie regarding trivia of the Valerie Plame Wilson CIA leak case, however, you probably have a dim idea, at best, of what I’m talking about.  Perhaps these words will refresh your memory:

… a senior administration official said two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and revealed the identity and occupation of Wilson’s wife. That was shortly after Wilson revealed in July that the CIA had sent him to Niger last year to look into the uranium claim and that he had found no evidence to back up the charge….

“Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge,” the senior official said of the alleged leak.

Granted, Mike Allen’s moment of celebrity for breaking this story faded in part because the proverbial other shoe never fell — the identity of the “senior administration official” was never revealed publicly, much less those of the leakers or the journalists involved.

But I suspect it’s not a coincidence that immediately after reading this article in September 2003, ex-Bushite press secretary Ari Fleischer sought high-priced legal help and refused to talk to FBI investigators without a promise of immunity.  Or that Fleischer would eventually admit speaking to the Post’s Walter Pincus on July 12, 2003, as part of a series of phone calls to (at least six?) Washington journalists he made with WH communications director Dan Bartlett from Air Force One during a flight back from Africa.

Pincus himself testified in Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s perjury trial that Fleischer had leaked to him about Plame in that conversation.  As it happens, on July 12, 2003, Pincus was working on an article for the Post untangling some of the lies the Bush administration had told about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, a piece on which he shared a byline with… Mike Allen.  (Not surprisingly, Pincus was also an unnamed source in the Post’s scandal-breaking story quoted above.)

I suppose that if you asked Allen about this now, he’d get a faraway look in his eyes and say, “Ah, but that was a long time ago.” If he remembered at all, that is, in the blur of his near-sleepless life collecting tidbits of gossip and false leads for Politico.

That the latter is what has made Mike Allen a truly powerful reporter in Washington says more about our politics than I care to imagine.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

Alec MacGillis of the Washington Post attended the AFL-CIO convention in Pittsburgh yesterday, and wrote this about President Obama’s speech there:

In a fiery speech to the nation’s largest labor federation, Obama urged members to get behind his proposal to overhaul the health-care system, which he vowed would pass in the next few months. To his audience’s satisfaction, he reiterated his support for including a government-run insurance plan, or public option, among the choices for consumers — a top priority for AFL-CIO leaders. And he dropped some of the language he used in last week’s health-care address to Congress in which he seemed to play down the importance of the public option.

But Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times was also there, apparently in the same convention hall but a different world:

A week after he asked Democrats in Congress to support the outlines of his health care plan, Mr. Obama made a similar but broader case to union audiences here and earlier Tuesday in Ohio. . . .

Yet despite the thunderous applause he received, his mentioning the term “public option” only once during a 35-minute speech at the convention did not go unnoticed. Many delegates carried signs and wore T-shirts declaring that a government-run insurance program was a nonnegotiable piece of health care legislation.

I suppose this is better than MacGillis and Zeleny getting together and deciding among themselves what the approved spin should be.  But still…

Matt Yglesias caught this bit of double-talk about the Rod Blagojevich indictments coming from the Washington Post‘s Shailagh Murray in an online chat yesterday:

There isn’t a reasonable person around who thinks this scandal will taint Obama in any meaningful way, but at the very least, it reminds people of the political world from whence he came. This story could be a useful preamble to something bigger down the road.

Seeing Murray’s eagerness to tolerate phony claims of corruption in the hopes they will prove “useful” in reporting on a hoped-for presidential scandal later, I immediately flashed back to her comments in the summer of 2007, reacting to the actual corruption of a President commuting the sentence of a criminal in his own administration:

Yaawwn. That’s my view of the Libby flap. What on earth did people expect Bush to do?

Apparently her enthusiasm for White House scandal depends greatly on which party is occupying the White House.

Via Think Progress, Jeff Bercovici of Portfolio.com reports on a conversation with perversely influential moron Bill Kristol (whose career arc has taken him from being the “brains behind Dan Quayle” to the impressive dual misadventure of helping bring America both the Iraq war and Sarah Palin):

I asked Kristol about the rumors that he might be leaving the New York Times op-ed page after his contract expires next month. Did he expect to have it renewed?

“I don’t think I’ve had that conversation yet,” he told me.

You don’t think you’ve “had that conversation yet”?  You’d think a lifelong neoconservative would be a more convincing liar.  Bercovici continues:

Okay — but would he like to have it renewed? “I’m ambivalent. It’s been fun. It’s a lot of work. I have a lot of things going on. But I haven’t really focused on it.”

Yep, he’s toast.  Assuming this firing non-renewal comes to pass, though, it would constitute an event so unlikely many observers considered it physically impossible — a conservative actually being held responsible for failure.

From Howard Kurtz’s Monday column for the Washington Post:

Fox News is expected to announce today the hiring of a new contributor, a veteran national security correspondent who has shared a Pulitzer Prize.

Her name is Judith Miller, and she is nothing if not controversial. Miller left the New York Times in 2005 after testifying in the trial of former White House aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby that he had leaked her information about a CIA operative. Miller’s conduct in the case, which led to her serving 85 days in jail for initially refusing to testify, drew rebukes from the Times executive editor and some of her colleagues.

In the run-up to the Iraq war, Miller reported stories on the search for Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction that turned out to be untrue, some of which were cited in a Times editor’s note acknowledging the flawed coverage. Miller, now with the conservative Manhattan Institute, wrote when she left the paper that she had “become a lightning rod for public fury over the intelligence failures that helped lead our country to war.”

Miller will be an on-air analyst and will write for Fox’s Web site. “She has a very impressive résumé,” says Senior Vice President John Moody. “We’ve all had stories that didn’t come out exactly as we had hoped. It’s certainly something she’s going to be associated with for all time, and there’s not much anyone can do about that, but we want to make use of the tremendous expertise she brings on a lot of other issues. . . . She has explained herself and she has nothing to apologize for.”

Given her background in ideologically motivated snipe hunts, Miller seems like a perfect fit to join Fox News’ round-the-clock coverage of ACORN’s alleged vote-fraud activities.

If you thought AP Washington bureau chief Ron Fournier would be a bit chastened by the reaction to his laughably biased criticism of Barack Obama’s VP pick the other day — you know, the article that launched letter-writing protest campaigns by MoveOn.org and Firedoglake — you’d better guess again.

Here he is tonight, spitting reflecting on Hillary Clinton’s speech to the Democratic convention:

Clinton had to somehow convince people that she honestly thought Obama was ready for the presidency. But something stood in her way: Her words.

– Dec. 3, 2007: “So you decide which makes more sense: Entrust our country to someone who is ready on Day One … or to put America in the hands of someone with little national or international experience, who started running for president the day he arrived in the U.S. Senate.”

– March 2008. “I know Sen. McCain has a lifetime of experience that he will bring to the White House. And Sen. Obama has a speech he gave in 2002.“

I know, I know — you’re shocked that a now-famed McCainiac like Fournier found a way to work some out-of-context “praise” for John McCain in reporting on a speech that focused on all the things Clinton and Barack Obama are for, but McCain is against (as Hillary herself repeatedly pointed out during the primaries, even as she competed against Obama). For example, Clinton said:

We need to elect Barack Obama because we need a President who understands that America can’t compete in a global economy by padding the pockets of energy speculators, while ignoring the workers whose jobs have been shipped overseas. We need a President who understands that we can’t solve the problems of global warming by giving windfall profits to the oil companies while ignoring opportunities to invest in new technologies that will build a green economy.

But those weren’t the words Ron Fournier was interested in — he cared much more about stray remarks from six or eight months ago. Not once in his article, in fact, does Fournier concede that Obama and Clinton favor many of the same policies… in other words, that she might back Obama not merely because he defeated her but because they both sought to achieve the same goals for this country.

Because what Clinton and Obama actually believe isn’t important to Fournier, any more than he gave a flying fig about Clinton’s actual speech last night. His intention is to distract readers from what she said, to disrupt what Clinton and Obama are seeking to achieve by imposing his previously-formed opinions on the event.

In a “news” story. For the once-famously objective Associated Press.

But if Fournier has to take them down, too, along the way, he will. After all, he’s got a candidate to get elected.

(“Ron Fournier’s Notebook” image above by yours truly. Thanks to Ego-Box for the hand-drawn hearts.)

The reactionary media is at it again – now they are criticizing Obama for not giving the GOP Slime Machine a chance to get a picture of him giving a speech with a couple of obvious muslims standing behind him that they can use in their news reports and viral emails spreading the lie that Obama is a Muslim.

But I can see the point of some of the veil-wearing folks excluded by the Obama team – how can it be ‘change’ when the candidate is doing the same careful stage operations as the wrong-wing guy?

Well in the grand guerrilla tradition, rather than just going down the traditional playbook, Team Obama should take a page from the greatest sales guy I ever worked with.

Back in the mists of time, the late 1980s, there was an expression in my industry that ‘nobody ever got fired for buying Blue (IBM).’ I worked for an upstart computer company at the time as a sales engineer, and it was my job, and the job of the sales guy I worked with, to ‘bust in’ to Big Blue territory, financial services companies in the Bay Area.

The sales guy in question was an ex-Blue man, a grizzled veteran who knew the Blue playbook from inside out. We had our first real prospect, a large insurer that was an all-Blue shop. A maverick IT guy was pushing our technology – the CIO spent his weekends and evenings out on the golf course with the IBM sales guy. Impossible situation, right?

Well the sales guy did some sales jiu-jitsu, turning our disadvantages to advantages. It so happened that the insurer’s disk drives were filling up. He coached our champion about what IBM would do – send an analyst out, who would putter around, create a report and recommend a lot of expensive new disk drives. But the Blue secret was that the way IBM setup databases at the time was to never ‘clean out’ deleted data or information, just deactivate it, gradually filling up storage. A simple utility could be written to clear out unused data, so no new disk was required. Our champion, filled with this secret knowledge, went behind the CIO’s back to the President and ‘predicted’ IBM’s and the CIO’s recommendation.

That was one of several examples that our sales guy and the champion used to ‘set up’ the CIO. And the result? The CIO was fired for recommending Blue!

In the case of Obama, he would do well to follow that plan. The GOP Slime Machine playbook is pretty predictable at this point. So going back to the picture of Obama with the Muslims – of course they are looking for that photo-op. So why not make it obvious?

He could start out his speech saying “If you will all notice there are two Muslim-Americans behind me. By tomorrow you’ll see this very scene, with everybody but me and these two Americans cropped out of the picture, running non-stop on Fox-News, complete with a running ticker-tape with words like “Al Qaeda, Muslim, Jihad and Islam” streaming underneath. Then, the following day, you’ll see their colleagues on other news channels like CNN & MSNBC start rehashing the same speaking points about how people all think I am Islamic. So the next two days, let’s all play a little game – every time you see this picture, or a Media Pundit say the words Obama and Muslim in the same sentence, send an email or call the station’s ombudsman and ask them why the are running this story? That’s the surest way we can stop this electioneering ‘business as usual.” Or something to that effect.

In this fashion Obama could set the agenda, rather than constantly reacting to the latest reactionary Media Echo Chamber attack.

On a related issue, Green Boy Sr. (dad) had a great suggestion about McCain’s constant whining about Obama not visiting Iraq. If Obama goes to Iraq he is just following the McCain agenda, and will get caught in bad photo ops (ill-fitting flack jacket, troops all around), and get the same orchestrated propaganda tour. However, if he blows off Iraq, and just goes straight to Afghanistan, he would have the opportunity (given the current crop of bad news as A’stan is starting to swirl faster down the drain) of seizing the initiative. “Senator McCain, where are you when Afghanistan is falling apart? Here is where you can find Al Qaeda; here is where you can find the Taliban. And here is where our troops need to be, supporting our ally, not in Iraq where we are unwanted.” Or something to that effect.