The Man Behind the Man of Hope and Change

By EUGENE MULERO, CORRESPONDENT

When David Axelrod attended the Democratic Caucus luncheon in the Ohio Clock Corridor section inside Capitol Hill on June 17, reporters did not recognize him. Axelrod, who’s about six feet two inches with black hair and an average build, walked like an unknown near the elevators between the lunchroom and the Senate’s chamber floor.

The reporters whispered amongst themselves trying to figure out who he was. After a few minutes, another reporter and I realized that it was Axelrod—Obama’s brain.

As soon as word about his identity got around, the reporters flocked to him. His visit to Capitol Hill ended up receiving minor TV and print news coverage.

I was only able to recognize “Ax,” as he’s known in his inner circle, because I had read a profile about him in The New York Times Magazine in 2007; otherwise, I’m sure he would’ve been just another face for me. However, seeing how clueless my fellow members of the media were that day about who Axelrod was, made me think that most people are probably not paying close attention to Obama.

Let me put it this way—Axelrod is to Obama as Karl Rove was to Bush. I mean, Axelrod provides Obama with his stuff. That speech we heard Obama give at the Democratic National Convention just a few days ago—that was Axelrod talking.

This should be alarming to most voters because Axelrod is a former Chicago Tribune hack who left journalism for the unpleasant life of a political strategist. Axelrod’s specialty, no less, is getting African-American candidates elected—seriously. He has succeeded in Massachusetts, with Gov. Deval Patrick, and in Philadelphia with former Mayor John F. Street.

Obama is the most sellable African-American candidate Axelrod could find. Obama learned politics from Illinois’s established political boss (Emil Jones, Jr.) and he’s aligned himself with the established Democratic guard on Capitol Hill (Sen. Ted Kennedy).

A professor at McGill University gave me new perspective on the whole Obama campaign a few weeks ago when he told me, “A lot of voters will be disillusioned if Obama wins.”

Axelrod must know this to some degree. While the strategy he is pushing, “hope” and “change,” propelled Obama to the democratic nomination, I find it insulting.

“Hope” and “change” should be nothing more than song titles on an early Beatles album, not the campaign talking points for a man seeking the post of Commander-in-Chief. And only a few news organizations (ie, The Economist, The New Yorker) have picked up on this. The rest of the herd media is pumping the “H & C” tune, which is ensuring a job in the White House for Axelrod.

But think about Axelrod’s strategy. Hope is the ego relying on artificial stimuli to help convince itself of an outcome that might occur (often when the ego is in a state of desperation). And, change is the constant in our universe. Anybody can guarantee change. That’s like me telling everybody I can provide them with gravity.

Obama tells audiences “there’s not a black America … there’s only a United States of America.” However, is hope going to help the African-Americans in New Orleans who are still homeless three years after Katrina, or Mexican-American day laborers who are mistreated in Arizona, or the Dominicans in Washington Heights worried about corrupt police officers?

Of course not.

Eugene may be reached at Eugene.Mulero@gmail.com.

Walker Rant: Palin v. Clinton, Woman on Woman

In The Newsroom with Casey and Eugene: Sept. 1

Walker Rant: Hate Conventions?

My Mama Really Does Love Obama

By KRISTIN JONES, CORRESPONDENT

As a member of the working press, I am of course non-partisan and thoroughly objective. But in the spirit of full disclosure, I have to say that my mother is a total Obamamaniac. She’s extreme. On two cars, she has placed no less than three Obama bumper stickers. She has many different varieties of Obama buttons, which she will sometimes kiss. She sighs when she sees him on TV. My mom has a serious crush on Obama.

In my last post, I wrote that despite the message of change, this year’s Democratic convention has brought about the usual amount of insider partying and back-room dealings. But my mom—who is more than a little suspicious of my reporting activities—went out  of her way this week to prove that politics is actually for the people, and any cynicism is probably misplaced.

A Denver resident for 19 years and a lifelong Democrat who is elated by the nomination today of Barack Obama, my mother has taken full advantage of the DNC’s public events. Though she didn’t win the lottery to see the acceptance speech tonight, she has braved the detours, police, crowds, and seething Clinton supporters to grab all the democracy she can get her hands on.

On Monday, she went to the Seniors Caucus. On Tuesday, she went to the Women’s Caucus. The events led her to muse on John McCain’s threat to social security and the intact glass ceiling for women in this country.

On Denver’s squeaky-new lightrail, she acts like someone who hasn’t learned (as I have) that public transportation is for ignoring people. She strikes up conversations with people like Rich Locklear, a young delegate here from New Jersey who spent five years in the military, served in Iraq, and appreciates Obama for his opposition to the war. Young people involved in politics energize my mother—so long as they’re not Republicans—and she tells them so. She showed up at a Trick-or-Vote costume party to rally young voters, grabbed a cocktail, and after congratulating the youth on their enthusiasm, urged them to forsake their 501c3 status and throw their support behind Obama.

It’s been a long time since the Democratic Party inspired this kind of fervor among its supporters. My mom still talks about JFK. Maybe it’s just what it needs to win.

Tonight, Mile High Stadium will be short one very vocal fan. But my mom is sure to be glued to the TV, swooning and crying.

Kristin Jones may be reached at KristinJones5000@gmail.com.

Wyclef for Vice President? VIPs, 24-Hour Party People

BY KRISTIN JONES, CORRESPONDENT

Even before the DNC got rolling yesterday, there was action at the Pepsi Center, at least for the insiders. Top bundlers for the Obama campaign were invited on Sunday to celebrate at a “Podium Party” in which they were feted by Howard Dean and allowed to have their photos taken at the main podium. It was a small prize for raising tens of thousands of dollars, but it was only one part of the extravaganza. Donors are treated to a week’s worth of free hors d’oeuvres, open bars and high-powered mingling.

“The great thing about Obama’s campaign is that you don’t have to be a very wealthy person to be involved with it,” said Les Coney, a member of Obama’s National Finance Committee who is inspired by the Democratic candidate’s civil rights message.

But it certainly helps to know some very wealthy people if you’re looking to get the celebrity treatment in Denver this week. Coney, a Chicago businessman, received his post in the committee by raising $250,000 for the primary season, and committing to another $250,000 for the general election.

Last night, Coney invited me to one of the thank-you parties at a Denver nightclub called Theorie. The red carpet was laid out for donors, athletes and performers at a party hosted by Perennial Sports and Entertainment, one branch of a lobbying firm that represents NBA athletes and baseball umpires, among other interests. A long-legged blonde in a mini-skirt handed out hors d’oeuvres and other women offered hand massages as a mostly young and African-American crowd of good-looking and/or powerful individuals took advantage of the open bar.

It was tough to get an invite; even tougher to get into a small private room where VIPs, such as Coney, could spread out while the rest of the club got packed in. The real pay-off happened around 11:30 p.m., when Wyclef Jean was escorted into the glassed-in private room to a flash of cameras and a cheer. The club’s organizers let a pressing wave of non-VIPs into the fishbowl, then shut it off as the show began.

Wyclef, whose performances can be inconsistent, was dynamic and en pointe. He led the crowd in a chorus of “Obama for President!” and nominated himself for vice president between oldies-but goodies like “Gone ’til November.” His band played the national anthem, as if to reclaim for the crowd the patriotic sentiment that once seemed owned by someone else.

“I wish the people outside could come inside,” he said in a shout-out to those stuck outside the lucky room.

Yeah. Like me.

Two doors down, firefighters sat outside their station and listened to the show. For them and much of the rest of Denver, the convention is both a point of pride and a nuisance. Many of the major downtown arteries have been shut off and residents have been encouraged to leave their cars at home in favor of the light rail, which skips central spots such as the Pepsi Center. Protesters are there, of course. But they are outnumbered by riot security, hanging on the outside of police vans like a militia ready for battle, and lined up two-deep and by the hundreds in front of rag-tag anarchists and tattooed malcontents.

Is this the change Obama is promising?

Kristin Jones may be reached at KristinJones5000@gmail.com.

Let’s Focus on Real Issues, People!

BY MATT KENNARD, COLUMNIST

It’s a cliché that gets a generous airing every election season. This vote, some dunce burbles, this one more than all the others, is the most important American election since sometime in the prehistory of the republic.

In 1996, Democratic National Committee chairman Don Fowler warned gravely that the vote was “the most important election since 1932,” continuing that it was “not just the next four years, but literally the next four decades” at stake.

In 2000, Charlton Heston cautioned his loyal following at the NRA that, “This election is the most important election since” – this time – “the Civil War.” He continued in his apocalyptic register thusly: “Freedom has never seen greater peril or needed you more to come to her defense.”

Fast-forward a highly eventful four years to 2004, and Washington Times columnist Harlan Ullman is found opining, “I also believe this may be the most important election since 1860.” He continued: “We face new and radically different threats and challenges to our safety and prosperity.”

So I feel it’s good form that I make the not-so-bold pronouncement that the 2008 election is the most important in the history of the U.S. since … well, ever.

The American people, after eight years of an administration that has botched two wars, ripped up large parts of the Constitution, legalized torture and destroyed alliances all over the world, have a massive choice to make. Yet the mainstream media doesn’t seem to be able to raise itself to the occasion and cover the contest with anything approaching the seriousness it deserves.

It’s striking and strange that a country that boasts the majestic wording of the First Amendment in its Constitution, and takes press freedom so seriously, should have a media so uniform in its asinine coverage of democracy’s most important rite of passage.

The choices in 2008 remain stark, the issues massive, yet we are plagued with extraneous conversations that belong in the National Enquirer on a slow news week rather than any self-respecting journal or television news program.

So we got weeks of CNN coverage about Hillary’s stage-managed lachrymose breakdown in New Hampshire when, news in brief if at all, we hear more than 80% of Americans want an overhaul of the health-care system.

Then there’s the three-hour symposium on Fox News about whether Obama is too skinny to be president while we wait forever for a mention of a poll showing that a majority of Americans say Congress should pass a resolution that outlines a plan for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.

The regression of the U.S. media has gone so far in this direction now that it resembles a howling baby, crying interminably about trivialities that have no impact on the lives of ordinary Americans.

The intuitive reasoning for this sorry state is that media outlets just have so much airtime or so many columns to fill that any minuscule speck of news has to be parsed so thoroughly that it disintegrates into even smaller motes of nothingness. That’s the intuitive reasoning. But it’s obviously deeper than that. The reluctance of mainstream media to stray from their self-imposed exile in the intellectual backwaters of triviality and banality has roots in prosaic structural problems: these institutions are owned by interests that just don’t want serious issues discussed.

The average person made to watch Fox News and CNN for the last six months probably would be able to tell you what the significance of Barack Obama’s new haircut is for the Iraqi people, but they couldn’t tell you what the difference between the actual policies of the two nominees vis-à-vis withdrawal.

They could tell you that McCain was more solid on “national security” than Obama, but they couldn’t tell you why. And that’s because these narratives are built on shaky edifices and tumble as soon as they are scrutinized.

McCain’s foreign policy experience is being a prisoner of war during Vietnam, supporting a catastrophic war in Iraq which increased Islamic fundamentalism there, singing ‘Bomb Iran’ to the Beach Boys classic “Barbara Ann” and saying that Al-Qaeda is Shia.

He’s a tool and ignoramus when it comes to foreign policy and his campaign team surely asks him to avoid the topic for fear of a senile mix-up. But no one knows the reality, no one is allowed to know. There may be coverage of individual mess-ups, but it will never put a dent in the assiduously devised meta-narratives that govern how we think or are manipulated to think about these people.

Regardless, this is how it seems election campaigns are run in the U.S., and over the rest of the Western world (in a slightly more attenuated variety). Once a meme is put out in the open and affirmed by some talking head and repeated enough it becomes, inexorably, The Truth. Obama’s vacuous allusions to “hope” and “change,” which when pulled down from the reaches of outer space where they reside mean absolutely nothing. Or McCain’s self-avowed status as an “outsider” and “maverick” which are so opposite to reality that Orwell would not know whether to laugh or cry.

But this branding of candidates and its parroting by the media has been understood by the public relations industry for a long time as the most effective way of selling a product. And Obama and McCain are products, like Coca-Cola or Citibank, that must be sold through sedulous attention to good branding. Walter Lippmann is seen as the father of today’s PR monstrosity and his 1922 opus, “Public Opinion,” contains countless juicy nuggets of insight into methods for controlling the public mind that still hold for today’s campaign strategists. “Great men, even during their lifetime, are usually known to the public only through a fictitious personality,” he wrote back then. “Royal personages are, of course, constructed personalities. Whether they themselves believe in their public character, or whether they merely permit the chamberlain to stage-manage it, there are at least two distinct selves, the public and regal self, the private and human.”  Lippmann welcomed the generation of this fantasy world as the only way to run a society, a class of opinion-formers guiding the dullard masses by the hand through the complexities they could never understand. Obviously this comes up hard against what we think of as democratic theory, but his conception is essentially how we exist now.

A random tourist upon touching down in New York could be forgiven for thinking that the The Onion was a respectable mainstream publication. The satire it contains is so wickedly mordant that its subtleties, in the context of today’s idiotic election coverage, could easily, and probably have been, lost on the uninitiated. Witness: “Obama’s Hillbilly Half-Brother Threatening To Derail Campaign.” Or: “McCain To Send Self Back To Vietnamese POW Camp To Revitalize Campaign.” Or even: “Kaine You Fit on a Bumper Sticker?” – an article about whether the VP should be chosen with the length of their name in mind for bumper stickers. They seem like they could be totally legitimate stories nowadays, and the last one was, carried on Fox News on July 31st.

The problem is trying to understand which way the currents are moving. Are the PR hucksters running both the campaigns creating this infantile climate by making sure serious issues aren’t mentioned because of their corporate backers? Or are the media omitting the serious stories that are out there and covering the trash? The scary truth is that it’s a medley of the two. The campaigns are bankrolled by private interests, which include, in heavy dollars, the energy, pharmaceutical and arms industries. Therefore a campaign that moves away from an addiction to oil, moves toward a comprehensive health-care system and away from war with Iran and anyone else – policies most Americans support – just will not be at the top of any campaign’s talking points.

Instead the vacuum will be filled with imbecilic words that are meant to strike an emotional chord with people hoping for some change for the better, but no commitment to specifics of how to deliver it. This chasm between airy semantics and real, political resolutions is often and tragically filled with jingoism, sexism or any other atavistic impulse that people fall back on when they get desperate and see no way of attenuating their pains and worries through ‘mainstream’ politics.

The unfortunate thing about American democracy is that both parties are equally to blame. Award-winning journalist Naomi Klein writes that the spectrum in the States runs from far-right to center-right, and in terms of global standards she is undoubtedly correct. So the constant partisan bickering between Democrats and Republicans is good sport, i.e., we all have a team and back them loyally, but essentially they both agree on the fundamentals. In fact, in U.S. history the Democrats have tended to be the most warmongering and violent. It’s often forgotten that JFK was the first president to send troops to South Vietnam and so launch the ‘hot war’ that over the next fifteen years would destroy that nation and poison it forever - with the help of LBJ after Kennedy’s assassination.

All the atrocities since then – perpetrated by Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush I, Bush II – have all been supported by a large number of Democrats. The great lie of American democracy is that there is a diversity of ideology; it’s a two-party state that worships one ideology. The rancorous debate between the two sides is very effective in convincing the American populace that they live in a vibrant democracy, but in fact the choices are so circumscribed as to be merely cosmetic.

The abiding wisdom is that journalists can’t question this; they must remain steadfastly neutral and cover the world “as it is.” We must be impartial and follow the agenda, covering it fairly and accurately.

This theory of journalism holds sway over the whole establishment and their breeding ground in the Ivy League. I have just been through nine months of imbibing this at Columbia University. The trouble is that there exists no such thing as “neutrality” and the world is too multifarious to capture it in its full richness, which is what the term “as it is” must demand. Choosing what to put in and what to keep out is a function of bias in itself.

Even our everyday rhetoric is imbued with connotations and substratum meaning that we have no hope of comprehending because we are so far steeped in it. If you use the wording of the mainstream media you are instantly taking a position without even realizing: you used the “war on terror” instead of “war of terror,” you used the phrase “humanitarian intervention” instead of “military assault,” you used the word “neoliberalism” instead of “economic imperialism.” None of these antinodes have a rational claim to supremacy, but the fact that we reflexively use the former instead of the latter reveals the hidden presuppositions that are so deeply embedded as to be invisible to your standard career-minded dupe journalist. Not using these terms make you the radical, while the people who conceive of it are the self-avowed “moderates.”

At some point it becomes hard to fathom whether the dire state of the media is because journalists are on the whole dumb or, more insidiously, they refuse to critically analyze these currents because they know that their careers will suffer if they do. Maybe it’s a combination of retardation and egoism that is eroding the edifice.

Take say, the furor around Rev. Jeremiah Wright (who was a rare moment of clear-sightedness in the election campaign). He was tarnished as a radical and racist and every other standard epithet dished out to someone who doesn’t sit snugly in the one-dial ideological consensus. What was left out of the filthy coverage was that when Martin Luther King was alive (and hated by mainstream society) he was saying things like, “My country is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” which resonates jarringly with Wright’s pronouncements. Of course, the canonization of radicals is only allowed after their power has been blunted, but the inability of the media to even fathom the links between the rhetoric of the two men is either a collective moment of amnesia or a shocking dereliction of duty so as not to rock the boat.

Essentially the problem isn’t that the media covers silly infantile stories, it’s that they don’t cover the serious ones. Politicos are playing a game, an important game because they govern us; the media’s job must be to breakdown the gloss of government and the patina of PR.

Matt Kenanrd may be reached at MattKennard@gmail.com.