Entries for September 2009

By Robert Schlesinger, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

Here's a new entry for your political phrasebooks: "Zero to Grayson in 60 seconds." It refers to a meteoric rise from back-bencher obscurity to featured character on the 24-hour news networks (60 seconds being the length of the typical House floor speech). Unfortunately, one doesn't go from zero to Grayson by dint of legislative skill and accomplishment. It takes crass or comically stupid comments—accusing your political opponents of hoping that the sick will hurry up and die, or of trying to pull the plug on grandma, for example.

By Robert Schlesinger, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

Washington and the nation lost a public treasure Sunday. So too did the English language.

William Safire, the former Nixon speechwriter and Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist, died of cancer Sunday. He was 79.

I met Safire several times over the years, mostly in the company of my late father at meetings of the Judson Welliver Society of former presidential speechwriters, which he stewarded for a quarter century or so. Bill always spoke softly and with the same care and wit evident in his writings.

By Robert Schlesinger, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

Bill Frist, the former Tennessee senator and senate Republican leader, endorses an individual mandate in today's U.S. News weekly edition. The idea of an individual mandate, which would legally require everyone to buy health insurance, has drawn fire from conservatives and Republicans in recent weeks. But Frist, a heart surgeon, writes that, "the only way affordable access can be achieved is for every citizen to have some type of health insurance." He writes that catastrophic insurance is "an appropriate place to start."

He adds:

By Robert Schlesinger, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

President Obama is reportedly planning a five-show Sunday sprint this weekend as part of his renewed healthcare push. But that is exactly the wrong thing to do, according to a recent study by a political scientist at the University of Houston. Brandon Rottinghaus looked at the effectiveness of three different presidential communications strategies: traveling around the country making their case, giving nationally-broadcast speeches or having press conferences.

Rottinghaus concludes that "televised interactions with the media always negatively affect leadership success." (h/t pollster.com) He's talking about televised press conferences, but the same principles apply to a one-on-one interview (or five of them) as a controlled mob scene. The reason is that during such press events, the president's message is challenged and probed, whereas in a speech the president's message is unchallenged. (Mostly.)

By Robert Schlesinger, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

My brush with nothing at all this morning: I drove over Washington's 14th Street Bridge at the same time that it reportedly wasn't in danger.

To catch everyone up: The reports that the Coast Guard fired "10 shots" (wonderful specificity there) at a mysterious boat on the Potomac River? Wrong. There is—according to the latest reports, so "facts" may change by the time I finish typing this blog post—no terrorist boat on the Potomac. And no shots were fired.

It turns out that the Coast Guard was conducting an exercise on the Potomac. Or maybe they weren't. MSNBC is reporting that there was not an exercise in the sense of people and boats actually doing things but was simply an over-the-radio drill that involved the phrase "shots fired."

Two things come to mind: An exercise of any sort on the Potomac on the morning of 9/11 while the president is driving by? It's so mind-numbingly dumb that it must be true.

Second this should spur a new round of media navel-gazing and, hopefully, a bit of self-flagellation. We all remember the tragedy and the bravery of that clear, crisp, awful morning eight years ago. Less well remembered are the reports—breathlessly related by the "news" networks—of a fire on the national mall, a car bomb at the State Department and so on. Hey—at least they got the information out there quickly. There's plenty of time for fact-checking later on.

In the mean time, stay glued to your television: The 24-hour "news" channels are continuing to follow this developing story. (Or is that devolving non-story?)

By Robert Schlesinger, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

While Peter may be a strong advocate of and a principal conceiver behind the "read the bill" movement, Politico has a good piece today reminding us all why members of Congress often don't read the bill in the first place. It's not (for the most part) laziness or legislative malfeasance:

But reading actual legislative text is often the least productive way to learn what’s actually in a bill.

Consider the House health care bill (or bills, as it were). The 1,017-page text is a tangle of references to other clauses, sections and subsections of the bill as well as numerous other statutes — some passed ages ago, all a pain to locate and search, even online: “Section 1179 of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1320d-8) is amended” by striking this and inserting that, or “the tax imposed under this section shall not be treated as a tax imposed by this chapter for the purposes of determining the amount of any credit under this chapter or for the purposes of section 55.”

There is certainly something to be said for not rushing legislation through before someone can read it. And legislators should certainly be responsible for ascertaining and digesting a bill's contents. But having a member of Congress read every page of every bill before voting on it would be an absurdly inefficient use of their time.

By Robert Schlesinger, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

There's an outbreak sweeping parts of the country, threatening to become a pandemic. H1N1? No, it's Political Derangement Syndrome (PDS). Its main symptom is believing everything the leader of the opposing party does is part of a nefarious, calculated, insidious, far-reaching conspiracy.

So take this story, from the front page of today's New York Times:

President Obama’s plan to deliver a speech to public school students on Tuesday has set off a revolt among conservative parents, who have accused the president of trying to indoctrinate their children with socialist ideas and are asking school officials to excuse the children from listening.

The President of the United States wants to give a "don't do drugs ... stay in school"-type address to the nation's school kids. ("This isn't a policy speech," an Education Department spokeswoman told the Times.) But of course in the world of the politically deranged, there are no innocent speeches and that is doubly true when the most innocent among us are involved.

So of course it must be part of a larger plot to inculcate socialist ideas into our students, because ... 2 + 2 = crazy. (Pity the poor parents who will be helpless to explain to their children the virtues of the free market system after they've been exposed to the  silver-tongued POTUS.)