We all think, or at least hope, that things are going to go well tomorrow. I think we can be pretty confident of the House, but the polls suggest it’s going to be very close in the Senate.
That’s what leads me to my nightmare: The votes are all in Tuesday night and the Senate is split 50-50.
Is there anyone who thinks the R’s won’t offer Lieberman something big, like the chair of Judiciary, or maybe Homeland Security, to get him to switch?
And is there anyone who thinks he won’t do it?
From BFP today:
“Jim Hogue, a Vermont Green gubernatorial candidate who has portrayed Ethan Allen as a performer, said Douglas should have “dug his heels in” on the tire burn and found some more “imaginative ways” to fight the company’s plan.
“Vermont should not be used as a guinea pig” by International Paper, Hogue said.
I was hoping that Scudder would hammer on this issue, I think it would resonate. Douglas obviously has friends in high places who he can call to get a favor done, why didn’t he call for some support on this issue??
Did you see the VPIRG “duck and cover” press release about the burn? Keep your children inside for recess…?
With the actual burn starting today, this has all the ingredients to be an issue that could hurt Douglas, IMO.
From yesterday’s Salon:
The election is four days away, and I’m through dicking around with you. Here are your talking points:
1) When they say, “Democrats will raise taxes,” you say, “We have to, because some asshole spent all the money in the world cutting Paris Hilton’s taxes and not killing Osama bin Laden.” In just six years the national debt has doubled. You can’t keep spending money you don’t take in, that’s not even elementary economics, that’s just called “Don’t be Michael Jackson.”
Courtesy of Pollster.com, here’s what will probably be the final polling averages on the big three Vermont races before election day.
As the cliche goes… It’s all about the ground game now.
[These charts are slightly interactive… Check and uncheck the checkboxes to your heart’s content… But, please, check yourself before you wreck yourself.]
If you need a reminder of what we’re up against, both nationally and locally, take a look at this piece that was mailed across the state last week:
And so we’re clear, this was not mailed from Washington, this is a piece paid for and mailed by the Vermont Republican Party. And they are saying that you and those you support want to make it “easier for terrorists to attack America” (among other things). Need I mention whose policies have made this country and the world less safe?
Let’s beat these bozos.
Why vote Democratic?
http://blog.thedemoc…
Now get out to the heavy traffic areas and wave signs! (:
Every vote counts!!!!!!!
Peace,
Barbara
From the Herald-Argus:
Dunne asked for, and eventually got, Dubie’s schedule for his four years in office, but has pointed out there are discrepancies between what the schedule said and where Dubie actually was. For instance during a family trip to Hawaii, Dubie’s schedule still listed events in Vermont.
A letter that accompanied the schedule when it was sent to Dunne includes a disclaimer that it may not be entirely accurate, since it wasn’t updated when meetings were added or cancelled.
This may be disappointing to other Dunne supporters, but I say halleluia. The question has been posed and answered, which is all I, for one, was clamoring for (note: I still think there’s more to talk about on this, but I also don’t think it’s worth persuing at this point, when it’s GOTV time). Still, the last forty-or-so hours since the Dunne press release went out has been very informative for me, and I’ll see if I can explain why.
First of all, I/we received essentially four responses from attempts to reach the traditional media gatekeepers during all this…
In today’s Darren Allen piece on the Vermont blogosphere (which, when he spoke to me, he made a point of telling me right up front with an eye-rolling tone, that this was an “editorial-driven” piece, by which he was presumably telling me “If it were up to me, no way in hell I’d be bothering to waste any time talking to you…” – which may explain the piece a bit, if you were wondering), I get to hold forth a bit on what was at the time a spur-of-the-moment description of the quality and relevance of the political blogosphere.
There’s a flow of information, largely geographically located between Montpelier and Burlington, but made up of politicians, special interests, some government employees and the press. It’s a small, fast moving current, and what comes out of that flow into the public consciousness is a spigot controlled by the press… and they have both a quota of information that is allowed to flow from that spigot, as well as rules for what makes it into the spigot’s pipeline.
Consider the Dubie story. It was generated by a press release from the Dunne campaign, yet when I spoke to someone on the phone at the AP, he hadn’t heard anything about it. Why? He’d gotten the same release I had, right?
Well, the rules have not quite been followed by the Dunne campaign. In recent weeks, the Dunne Team has been flooding the media with press releases. In all honesty, most look like they were schlocked out in a few seconds. They are often poorly organized, replete with typos, WAY too long, and in one case even misnamed a local reporter (you know they just love that). In the case of the recent press release that caused me to post on this whole matter, you actually had to scroll down a few paragraphs to reach the salient point. In fact, they had tried to cram 2 or 3 different points in, so you really had to read it directly in order to find the material.
In these waning days, the press is doubtless getting inundated with press releases. To get their attention (especially when you’ve been hitting them with multiple releases they may be feeling inclined to disregard), you need to be concise and to the point, and hit them with a thesis statement in the title that’s relevant. That wasn’t the case. The Dunne peole didn’t play by the rules, so the AP reporter I talked to didn’t know what I was talking about.
There’s also the timing. I already knew that these operations were short staffed on weekends, but what I learned is that there’s a structural bias against last-minute “gotchas” the weekend before an election. The press doesn’t want to get played for patsies and are dubious about anything that falls into that time frame. This made it all the more crucial that the Dunne press release be concise and to the point, coming as it did Friday at noon.
All this is to say that I’m not as riled up as I was that we had to jump up and down and scream for coverage of an issue that, on it’s face, was as I said – a bombshell.
But we still shouldn’t have had to make such a fuss.
As guardians of the “spigot,” press professionals make themselves the gatekeepers of what is worthy for discussion, and what the parameters of that discussion will be. And they often make little allowance for just how subjective the judgments made in the service of that guardianship are. In my own experience in the last day, I’ve seen just how broad the range of that subjectivity runs. On the one hand, I had a press pro telling me this was a non-story and “propoganda.” On the other side, I had another press professional telling me that his colleague had it “exactly wrong” and that it was indeed an issue. Then, to complete the spectrum, there was what actually made the papers; a short, perfunctory acknowledgement and response waaaay down in an omnibus election piece. The question asked and answered (which, I should mention, is ALL I ever cared to see – the question responsibly asked, and responsibly answered, whatever that answer turned out to be).
In other words, a very few informational gatekeepers had as broad a range possible of opinions on whether or not to open the gate for this story. This demonstrates just how subjective this process is, and therefore how prone to all the biases and human frailties these decisions actually are. There is no formula a story is plugged into to gauge its worthiness. No empirical analysis. These people are going with their gut – a gut informed by journalistic experience, sure, but that gut is also entirely situated within the context of the insulated information flow described above, and qualified by the power inherent in being guardians of the spigot.
Now consider how the political blogosphere changes things. Questions are answered by facts, and facts inevitably generate more questions. The guardians of the spigot have had the luxury of shorthanding the process by asking and answering the questions themselves before deciding what flows into the public consciousness.
But now there are blogs, and bloggers have an uncanny habit of finding the raw facts for themselves. In this case, there were facts that raised questions; Dubie released a schedule after dragging his feet in response to Dunne’s request. That schedule (which he was loathe to release) contained a bright, shining, verifiable contradiction. That led a to a big question, and we in the blogging world waited for it to be asked in the press.
…and we waited, and waited, and waited.
The fact is that such high-stakes questions of dishonesty in the public service are newsworthy in themselves – no one would argue that. What heppened in this case was that the press’s role in serving as arbiter of those questions was usurped, and the press was all over the map regarding how to respond to that. What to do? Ignore it and eye-roll or cover it thoroughly and completely?
In the end, believe it or not, I am satisfied not so much with the content of the Allen/Porter piece above, but with the process that (I assume) led to its publication. It’s likely that Allen, Porter, and Freyne as well, implicitly realized that there was little point in arguing for the primacy of their informational gatekeeper role – that in this case, that was beside the point. The point is, that a question, raised by facts, and therefore demanding of attention did in fact make it’s way outside of that insulated flow of information without passing through them. That the question was out there, and as such, it became their responsibility to answer it.
And like it or not, the answer was short and rather anticlimatic. The traditional media gatekeepers had more facts than the bloggers did. That’s not a surprise in-and-of-itself, but when the choice to just chuckle about it amongst themselves (and therefore leave bloggers and blog-readers with their worst fears and conspiracy theories about the biases of the media seemingly confirmed), or recognize that the situation had changed, and the matter needed to be directly addressed, different reporters reacted differently – again underscoring the real subjectivity inherent in the whole process.
Porter, Allen and Freyne got it. The others didn’t. And maybe we’ve all learned a little something about the other in the process.
…and with the legislative session looming, this is only the beginning. The blogs create opportunities for people outside the Montpelier-Burlington information flow to tap into it directly, bypassing the gatekeepers. At present, that means we can inject a bit of ourselves into the conversation and impact what squeezes out into the print and television media. And that’s a very big deal.
But the time is coming when the Vermont political blogosphere – like it’s national equivalent – will begin to break down those barriers completely, by bypassing the gatekeepers rather than influencing them, and speaking to other Vermonters more directly.
And when that finally happens, we’re in a brave new world of media…
( – promoted by odum)
I just got back from the Montpelier Bernie rally. It was something else, it was a who’s who for VT politcs. Pat Leahy was there, as were Dunne, Welch, Markowitz, Parker, and a host of other VT senators and congressmen. And Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! was there videotaping it.
My candidate, Donny Osman, kicked off the introductions, and was loud and got the people on their feet instantly (his fiery intro surprised the hell out of me – but it really got the crowd worked up).
Pat Leahy gave a rousing speech, the man talks like a true statesman. All of the other major players each gave a speech, ranging from truly inspiring to tepid (I’m keeping my mouth shut until the 8th!). And you can learn about a person by the way they shake your hand (which, in my crazy handshake analysis, corresponded directly to the quality of the speech).
The turnout was fantastic, the organizers had only ordered food for 200 and at least 2 to 3 times that showed up (please only take one roll!). It was a pep rally, but as it was over , I turned to my partner Jenni and said… this one’s different.
I know during the last two presidential elections, we knew how high the stakes were. I remember how numb we felt when we realized that dumbass got in there again. Somehow, I think the stakes are higher now. We’ve seen the damage of the neocon policies first hand. All of the lies are revealed, in a way that the evasions and parsing and ‘truthiness’ don’t cut it anymore. To the American public, the things happening nowadays aren’t just ‘liberal claptrap’ easily dismissed by the media. They are real. We were right, but that doesn’t matter now. What matters now is that people, even many who are diametrically opposed to many of the things we here at GMD value highly, are seeing things for what they are.
And for the first time in going to a political function, I actually walked away believing that we’re going to win this one. Many times I go to these as a supporter, but more so as an observer. I watch the crowds. I look for subtleties in the speech, the reactions in the audience, what words seem to resonate and inspire (and I’ve used this quite a bit in the Osman campaign). And there wasn’t that sense of desperation that there was at rallies 2 or 4 years ago. It wasn’t like watching John Kerry or Mike Dukkakis and just crossing your fingers and hoping. This one was downright confident. And electric.
you can read more of JD Ryan at
Vermonter posted this comment a few days ago that got no response. Recent events are highlighting his point.
One likely reason we haven’t and probably won’t get coverage of the Dubie-phony-schedule-release issue (cited below) in the Times Argus or Rutland Herald is the following:
Unfortunately for Dunne, Dubie’s schedule as lieutenant governor is busier than Dunne has made it out to be.
Vermonters have learned to like and respect him [Dubie], not so much for his politics, which are probably more conservative than that of most Vermonters, but because of his honesty, integrity and steadiness of character.
This comes from the papers’ endorsement of Dubie in yesterday’s edition. In making that endorsement based on Dubie’s integrity, they are unlikely to be favorably inclined to report on a story that directly calls that integrity – and by extension the validity and credibility of their endorsement – into question. Similarly, they’ve already passed judgment on the content of Dubie’s schedule. By saying “we endorse this guy ’cause he’s so honest” they look bad if he looks dishonest the very next day for all the world to see. And of course, by touting his schedule in their endorsement, it’s a poor reflection on them if the schedule is proven to be bogus.
These sorts of endorsements do create a conflict of interest of sorts within the traditional media (TM). It wouldn’t have to be a conflict if TM sources really did report the news as dispassionate chroniclers, but of course they don’t. These are people, with investments in their personal and institutional reputations, and like it or not, they wield an extraordinary degree of control over what the topic of discussion is, and what the parameters of that discussion are.
So yeah, given that these things can (and do) play out this way, I’m with Vermonter…
[UPDATE 10:19 AM: Do be nice if you call or email. I just got off the phone with one of the listed reporters who honestly didn’t know what I was talking about. In the rush of last minute election stuff, I guess he just missed it. That can happen, and these guys are only human. But it shows that if we work this, we can maybe get a response (it also shows that many of the political reporters still dont read the blogs — ah well, we’ll keep working on that, too…]
It’s 8:30 AM Saturday morning, and still not a peep about this:
From Dubie’s officially released schedule:
From the AP via kersplebedeb:
Associated Press
February 23, 2005HONOLULU — A University of Colorado professor who has been criticized for his comments likening some Sept. 11 victims to Nazis defended his position before an overflow crowd Tuesday night at the University of Hawaii.
Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie of Vermont, who was vacationing in Hawaii, was among those who turned out.
And from the Vermont press?
Here are some of the key press players to contact to ask why this isn’t getting the press coverage it seems obvious it demands.
Peter Freyne
Darren Allen
Louis Porter
Stewart Ledbetter
Terri Hallenbeck
Sam Hemmingway
I don’t have email addresses for the numerous others, such as David Gram and Ross Sneyd who write for the AP, but their phone number is 229-0577. If anyone has other contact info, post away. Be polite when you write or call, please.