No, what I'm referring to was when I opened up my NYT iPhone app on I think Friday and the first SIX top headlines were "Senate (party) stalls/blocks (important legislation), cites (other party) obstruction."
Not because it's news that the Senate in particular and Washington in general would much rather run in curly-Q's (I can NEVER spell that word, and being unable to spell words is so rare for me that I refuse to look them up on general principle) and collide into each other in the hope of some accidental polyester-clad frottage to engorge their shriveled members than actually make any decisions regarding governance, or that they would blame their unwillingness to earn their ludicrous health care premiums on all the other perverts in bad suits. But because the only thing worse than having to do anything is getting into a very public Mexican standoff, where rather than no one choosing to do anything for fear of alienating some voters, no one CAN do anything because they know whatever they do will end up alienating A LOT of voters.
He just wants to be touched. Someone. Anyone. Please.
This has happened before in my lifetime but not in my professional experience; I was an unspecified number of years below legal voting age during the government shutdown in 1995, and my interpretation of what it meant was skewed by growing up in a notoriously dysfunctional school district where the teacher's union either went on strike or threatened to at least once a year. Since getting a journalism education largely entails learning to keep your mouth shut before you know what's going on (you can always do some Monday morning quarterbacking later), I find it hard to have a very nuanced view of how it will play out.
My UN-NUANCED view is that it will end with the Democrats losing the staring contest and passing all the tax cuts, which will give Republicans free rein to lay even more of the deficit at Obama's doorstep and put the Democrats on the defensive for at least the next two years. I don't think there will be a serious left-wing challenger to Obama in 2012, and I think the Republicans will end up mired in another attenuated primary struggle (Brown will try and fail, DeMint is a joke, Palin might try to run as an independent which would be hilarious, Pawlenty won't make a big enough splash and will end up the VP candidate, it'll come down to Romney and Huckabee and Romney will take it) that will sap a lot of the Tea Party energy they had going this year.
Obama will get a second term, but not by a lot, and I don't think the Democrats will win back the House. He'll have an even tougher second term than first, only be able to pass legislation with the teeth removed (ex., we'll repeal DADT, but on such a farcical timetable that little gay ten year olds today will probably still be second-guessing themselves when they walk into the recruitment office after graduation), and largely be remembered as one of those visionary, single-tear-Indian presidents that will get another Nobel Peace Prize when he's seventy because maybe he couldn't get birth control in classrooms in the Ozarks but at least he's been doing that lecture tour on solar powered cars for the last five years.
Can he somehow avoid this by allowing all the tax cuts to expire, by reversing his stance on executive privilege and ending DADT with the stroke of a pen? No, he'd lose the middle and crash spectacularly. He's absolutely right about that. The point is IT SHOULD NEVER HAVE GOTTEN HERE. The minute - the minute - that anyone who claimed a shred of moral authority threatened to end unemployment benefits for hungry people unless tax cuts were preserved for millionaires, Obama should have gotten on television and said unequivocally, "This does not happen in America."
It's ironic and sad to me that a man who got elected for two reasons - that he promised, both verbally and in his person, a vigorous and vital defense of the promise of civil liberty, and because he recognized in American youth a deep hunger to foster democratic social justice with their votes and their advocacy - should not only lose what power he had to further the lot of minority groups by frittering away his credibility, but also completely squander his grassroots support by not deputizing those who really, truly, want to make a difference. JFK gave his youth contingent the Peace Corps. We have gotten nothing.
Look, this is why I can't write about politics full-time. I'm a general assignment reporter, so sometimes I do end up having to cover a race, or follow a piece of city or town legislation. Always local, nearly always small-time, and even then it's all I can do to keep an objective hand on the keyboard. The political coverage I've had to do so far has been neutral as milk, even boring. I'm PROUD when I can get it to boring. It means I've stopped shouting in my head, actually knuckled down and been a good reporter instead of satisfying my ego. That's what semi-anonymous blogs are for.
When I talk about philosophy, literature, even religion, I can be an appreciative audience for the many varieties of human wisdom. When I talk politics, I have two speeds; YES, EXACTLY and FUCK YOU.
That's why I don't think any of the articles I've read about DADT or the Bush tax cuts or unemployment insurance qualify as 'bad news' in the sense that I mean for this blog. Yes, they're bad news in that they're bad for America, and I'm sure if I went deep enough into the B section of any of the major dailies or smaller papers or blogs I'd find some that were poorly written as well. But the journalists who write about this objectively are doing work I can't even conceive of, under circumstances and pressures that would break me quickly if I were subjected to them. Knowing that takes a little edge off your mocking jones.
Instead, I've found myself wondering if there's anything short of abandoning our public mandate and becoming unpaid lobbyists that journalists can do to fix this. The cheap answer is abandon the 24-hour news cycle. But that's not realistic, or really, the point of breaking-news or assignment coverage. There is a place for long-view journalism, but you also need Twitter. And of course, nearly all of those kinds of decisions take place several pay grades above the reporter that writes the stuff.
What reporters CAN control (to a certain extent, depending on how well you manage your managers (more on this later)) is the way they write about politics. They can control verbs and nouns, they can avoid jargon or loaded terms, they can over-report, they can get expert testimony, historical or scientific perspective. If they're going to go for balance, they can at least pick the most moral voices on either side of the scale.
I can envision a professional accreditation society for journalists that admits members based on their ability to do this, that weighs the merits of your insightfulness and admits only those who have proven that, if they have to report on the thoughtless actions of thoughtless people, they will at least do so thoughtfully.
I can imagine the public recognizing this accreditation and learning to look for it when they read something that makes them think or question. I can imagine lawsuits for journalists who claim this accreditation falsely. I can imagine news organizations bragging to their readers or listeners that all their journalists are accredited.
But I can't imagine it happening NOW. Because however much people are reading, and listening, and craving to know the news, they aren't paying for it. I don't care if you read Huffington Post or Little Green Footballs, you probably get your news from someone who's better educated than your son's fifth-grade teacher and paid less than your pizza delivery boy.
We do a hard job, but anything that makes us more professional right now is bad for business. Because no one can afford to pay.
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