Sometime in politics it comes down to the good stuff – not the policy differences or the clever and very different election strategies, or the candidates’ take on the big issues of the day, or their moral, or nicely convenient expedient stance on this and that. The good stuff is the human stuff – the grudges and gaffes, where you find the meta-information about these folk who lead us, or would lead us. In the systems world, metadata is data about the nature of the data with which you are dealing – one level up. It’s useful in designing applications. Metadata lets you understand not only what you’re manipulating, but lets you work out the rules for making rules about it – think of it as, in fact, the rules about the rules. And of course you can also work out the metadata of the metadata, one level above that, but then you end up getting all metaphysical – you’re in the realm of knowledge about theories of knowledge, quite removed from the real. You end up sounding very silly. People look at you funny.
But the game with most people who write about politics is trying to work one level up. This happened or so-and-so said this – but you claim something larger is at play. Columnists get paid for insights into what they say is really going on, for perspective, while reporters earn their living one level down – reporting what happened and who said what. Reporters don’t mess with metadata – they’re busy enough as it is. That stuff one level up is just opinion, anyway. Everyone has opinions.
Of course, sometimes a reporter, like Anderson Cooper here, just has to call out bullshit, saying, flat-out, that what they hear being said to them is self-serving, useless drivel – it was the bodies in the streets of New Orleans being eaten by rats that got to Cooper. But even if this segment made his career, it was unprofessional. Let’s say you’re covering the White House and the president says the economy is great shape and everyone has plenty of money, so no one should worry about anything – and only a few lazy whiners think otherwise. You report what he said, without comment. You dig up the most impressive of the people who disagree with him and get some statements, air those, and you throw up some statistics on screen, if you’re at all enterprising. But you don’t discuss his odd obliviousness to reality, wondering if he’s being insulated from the facts by his staff, or manipulated by someone else for their own ends, or whether he is, in fact, dangerously delusional. That’s not your job. You leave that to the columnists. They say such things, and, if proven right, go one to their own kind of success – or these days, even if wrong over and over and over, write for the New York Times. See William Kristol.
But sometimes news items carry their own metadata, like this from the Telegraph (UK), on Sunday, June 29:
Mr Obama is expected to speak to Mr Clinton for the first time since he won the nomination in the next few days, but campaign insiders say that the former president’s future campaign role is a “sticking point” in peace talks with Mrs Clinton’s aides.
The Telegraph has learned that the former president’s rage is still so great that even loyal allies are shocked by his patronising attitude to Mr Obama, and believe that he risks damaging his own reputation by his intransigence.
A senior Democrat who worked for Mr Clinton has revealed that he recently told friends Mr Obama could “kiss my ass” in return for his support.
A second source said that the former president has kept his distance because he still does not believe Mr Obama can win the election.
Now that’s good stuff – inside information that tells you a lot about how things stand, and speaks to the personality of the former president. The detail:
It has long been known that Mr Clinton is angry at the way his own reputation was tarnished during the primary battle when several of his comments were interpreted as racist.
But his lingering fury has shocked his friends. The Democrat told the Telegraph: “He’s been angry for a while. But everyone thought he would get over it. He hasn’t. I’ve spoken to a couple of people who he’s been in contact with and he is mad as hell.
“He’s saying he’s not going to reach out, that Obama has to come to him. One person told me that Bill said Obama would have to quote kiss my ass close quote, if he wants his support.
“You can’t talk like that about Obama - he’s the nominee of your party, not some house boy you can order around.
“Hillary’s just getting on with it and so should Bill.”
For those who thought he was a petty asshole and sore loser, with an ego the size of Iowa – confirmation. And there’s this:
Joe Klein, the author of Primary Colours, a fictionalised account of Mr Clinton’s 1992 election, who has known the former president for 20 years, said he also heard that he was “very, very bitter”, from people who have spoken with him.
“It’s time for him to get over it or go off and do his charitable work. He knows the rules of the road. What’s going on now is kind of strange. I think his behaviour is really, really shocking.”
It’s just reporting, but it’s more than reporting. Perhaps it’s reporting with an agenda.
After all, Newsweek is reporting that John and Cindy McCain failed to pay taxes on a California property for the past four years – and as they’re worth about a hundred million, this is very odd. After a reporter asked about the bill – you know, you check with the campaign – they did send San Diego County a check for 6,744.42 – but they screwed up. They’re still short by 1,742.00 at the moment. Oops – not a big story, but it carries metadata. That, and two weeks ago this – the McCain couple carries a six-figure credit card debt, while Barack and Michelle Obama are not only debt-free, they’ve saved about the same amount for their daughters’ college funds. The stories carry the commentary.
But sometimes you cannot beat the pure joy of well-crafted opinion. In the current Rolling Stone, see Matt Taibbi on John McCain:
McCain enters the general election in the form of a man who has jettisoned the last traces of his dangerous unorthodoxy just in time to be plausible in the role of the torch-bearing leader of the anti-Obama mob, waving the flag and chanting, “One of us! One of us!” - all the way through to November. He now favors making the Bush tax cuts permanent, he’s unblinkingly pro-life every time he remembers to mention abortion, and he’s given up bitching about torture. With his newfound opposition to his own attempts to reform immigration policy and campaign finance, McCain is perhaps the first candidate in history to stump against two bills bearing his own name.
McCain’s transformation is so complete that at a recent town-hall meeting in Nashville, when asked to name an author who inspired him, the candidate - who once described televangelists of the Jerry Falwell genus as “agents of intolerance” - put none other than Joel Osteen at the top of his list. “He’s inspirational,” McCain said.
Standing at the meeting, I didn’t write Osteen’s name down in my notebook - apparently because my brain refused on some level to accept that McCain had actually said it. Of all the vile, fake, lying-ass, money-grubbing shyster scumbags on the face of this planet, there is perhaps none more loathsome than Osteen, a human haircut with plastic baseball-size teeth who has made a fortune selling the appalling only-in-America idea that terrestrial greed is actually a form of Christian devotion.
Now that’s nicely nasty. Why be just a reporter? This captures something one level up from the words and policy positions. As for the senior pastor of non-denominational Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas, you can see his plastic baseball-size teeth here, the man of the prosperity gospel, the belief that wealth and power are rewards for pious Christians. So is good dentistry - “Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth” (3 John 2). Have a positive attitude and Jesus will love you and make sure you get really filthy rich – grab everything you can. Whine and you get nothing. There’s a lot of metadata there.
Of course sometime the metadata is too tightly packed. The clever James Wolcott, an ardent Hillary Clinton supporter, is, of course, not pleased what he sees as the misogynist insults she had to endure – even if many of us ended up disliking her for her tactics late in the campaign, and would have ended up disliking her just as much were she a man, or a turnip. Wolcott is also dismayed by all the commentators who have a “man crush” on John McCain, enamored by his manly fighter pilot what-the-hell attitude. Wolcott compresses it all into one short paragraph:
Barack Obama’s willowiness and inability to pass muster as a member of the bowling team militate against his becoming a durable Man Crush object for the Beltway dilettanti, who wouldn’t be caught dead in a bingo hall. I await the inevitable moment when Matthews or Mike Barnicle or some other barstool philosopher announces that he has a Man Crush on Hillary Clinton once she’s out of the race. It would be a tribute to her toughness and a misogynist insult in one neat wrapper, but at least it wouldn’t have any of the stale piety that leaves a haze whenever John McCain is invoked. Even Karl Rove has begun sentimentalizing about McCain in print, which you know can’t be good. A Machiavellian with a Man Crush weaves a terrible web.
Wolcott is onto something here. You figure out what it is. It’s not nice. Male psychology can be scary.
And the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank’s is also onto something with his take on David Addington’s congressional testimony this week:
There he sat, hunched and scowling, at the witness table in front of the House Judiciary Committee: the bearded, burly form of the chief of staff and alter ego to the vice president - Cheney’s Cheney, if you will - and the man most responsible for building President Bush’s notion of an imperial presidency.
David Addington was there under subpoena. And he wasn’t happy about it.
Could the president ever be justified in breaking the law? “I’m not going to answer a legal opinion on every imaginable set of facts any human being could think of,” Addington growled. Did he consult Congress when interpreting torture laws? “That’s irrelevant,” he barked. Would it be legal to torture a detainee’s child? “I’m not here to render legal advice to your committee,” he snarled. “You do have attorneys of your own.”
At the Washington Monthly, Kevin Drum is onto something else:
OK, so Addington is not only an arrogant prick, he’s the kind of person who revels in being an arrogant prick. We’ve seen the type before and we’ll see it again: smart, well-briefed, and completely convinced of his own self-righteousness.
But there’s another aspect to this that never gets the attention it deserves: the Judiciary Committee members knew the kind of person Addington was. They knew he was smart and well-briefed and arrogant - and therefore difficult to question. But they all insisted on their ten minutes of glory anyway. Obviously the Republican members wouldn’t have given up their time in order to put Addington under more pressure, but why weren’t the Democrats willing to give up their collective time and turn it over to a staff member who was Addington’s equal and could have grilled him for a consecutive hour or two? That’s the only way it was even remotely plausible that they’d get anything useful out of him.
Instead we had a bunch of amateurs tossing easily evaded questions at him for a few minutes apiece. It was tailor-made to allow Addington to get away with saying nothing, and that’s exactly what he did. Next time the politicians ought to pack away their egos and let someone else take the stage.
That will never happen, but both Milbank and Drum do capture something important one level up. Those who run things, and the others who pass laws and keep an eye on them, are a strange lot.
Even minor upper-level stiff can be useful. In Time see Mark Halperin’s advice to John McCain, a long list, where one item jumps out at you:
9. Never say “My friend(s)…” again.
See Drum:
Where did McCain pick up this habit? It doesn’t make him sound like one of the guys, it makes him sound like he’s about to put the arm on you at a Turkish bazaar. It’s weird.
Ah, the good stuff is always one level up.
