Kurtz’ Annenberg tribulations, MSNBC denies reality, ABC nearly in jail, WSJ convention impressions, Dems’ Denver doldrums, and Biden-bashing on redstateupdate
By LisaB on August 28, 2008 at 11:45 AM in Current Affairs
1) From memeorandum, Politico has a piece describing some of the pressure brought to bear on Ayers-relationship researcher and conservative writer for NRO Stanley Kurtz. You may remember, Kurtz is writing about his efforts to see the Annenberg papers secreted away on the UIC campus library.
Barack Obama’s campaign hasn’t advertised this a great deal this week, but the campaign’s “Action Wire” has been waging large-scale campaigns against critics. That includes tens of thousands of e-mails to television stations running Harold Simmons’ Bill Ayers ad, and to their advertisers — including a list of major automobile and telecommunications companies.
And tonight, the campaign launched a more specific campaign: an effort to disrupt the appearance by a writer for National Review, Stanley Kurtz, on a Chicago radio program. Kurtz has been writing about Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayers, and has suggested that papers housed at the University of Illinois at Chicago would reveal new details of that relationship.
Not a surprise that a campaign should try to downplay any bad information, but it seems to me looking through these papers is a legitimate request. Obama was a board chair for the Annenberg project in Chicago and touts his experience.
[SusanUnPC's READER ALERT! Tonight, we are publishing a commentary by Ayers/Obama expert Steve Diamond, a professor of law. Expect to see Professor Diamond's MUST-READ article after the Obama coronation.]
2) At Swamppolitics, an article talks about the Obama campaign going after WGN radio for having Kurtz on the air.
Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign is organizing its supporters tonight to confront Tribune-owned WGN radio in Chicago for having a critic of the Illinois Democrat on its air.
“WGN radio is giving right-wing hatchet man Stanley Kurtz a forum to air his baseless, fear-mongering terrorist smears,” Obama’s campaign wrote in an e-mail to supporters. “He’s currently scheduled to spend a solid two-hour block from 9:00 to 11:00 p.m. pushing lies, distortions, and manipulations about Barack and University of Illinois professor William Ayers.”
The campaign sent email to supporters telling them the station should:
. . . offer sane, honest rebuttal to every one of Kurtz’s lies.
However, the executive produce of the WGN show featuring the interview said:
. . . the Obama campaign was asked to have someone appear on the show and the headquarters declined the request.
“He got into the files just yesterday, so we wanted to have him on to find out what he found and, if at all possible, we wanted to get the Obama campaign to get their side of the story,” Christenson said. “That’s why the uproar is kind of amazing, because we wanted the Obama campaign’s take as well to kind of balance it out.”The show’s producer said the calls dropped off after the show’s first hour. He did not have a count of calls, but said it was “non-stop.”
Obama’s campaign has launched similar offensives against stations that have run campaign ads that it did not like.
There has been A LOT of push back about these files. Is it all a feint or is there a reason?
3) Joan Walsh, at Salon, has a great piece about Bill Clinton’s speech last night.
All day long the cable talkers had their Clinton drama story line down: When Hillary Clinton pointedly asked her Obama-resistant admirers Tuesday night, “Were you in it just for me?” she was also talking to her husband.
Barely hours after Sen. Clinton got her media critics to sheath their knives with a stunning speech endorsing Barack Obama Tuesday night, critics had a new but depressingly familiar story line: President Bill Clinton would never match his wife’s enthusiastic backing of her former rival — and if he didn’t, her efforts to heal the party would be diminished. It was clear all day Wednesday that pretty much no matter what Bill Clinton said, the supposedly sulking former president could never be gracious enough, even after his wife moved to nominate Obama by acclamation partway through the roll call a few hours before he spoke. For the second night in a row, then, one of the Clintons had been assigned an impossible task, with lots of risk for failure but little reward even for doing it right.
But now the cable doomsayers are 0 for 2 with their hand-wringing Clinton predictions. MSNBC’s Chuck Todd had earlier reported some Democrats’ worries that Clinton might face boos — worries that seemed particularly ludicrous once wild cheering and frenzied flag waving erupted when Clinton took the podium at 7 p.m. sharp. He tried to quiet the crowd with “thank yous,” but they just got crazier, giving him a much longer and louder welcome than his wife.
————-The Obama campaign and convention organizers didn’t do much to make it easy for Clinton. He had to follow his former friend Rep. Jim Clyburn on the podium by about an hour; a nice word from Clyburn about the Clintons would have gone a long way to healing the rift that emerged in primary season when Clyburn began suggesting that both Clintons’ attacks on Barack Obama could be seen as racially insensitive. Clyburn failed to mention either Clinton. He spoke in the same hour as former friend Gov. Bill Richardson, who watched the Super Bowl with his buddy, reportedly promised not to endorse Obama, and then reneged.
Nice.
4) MSNBC continues to look like a frat party gone boring. Keith Olbermann got testy with Joe Scarborough the other day and now it is Republican pundit Mike Murphy. Now, we’re not necessarily fans of Murphy here at NQ, but we do think it fun to see Olbermann lose his cool and go all “little dictator” on someone.
Also at memeorandum, NewsBusters catches another “off-mic” comment from “professional news man” Keith Olbermann.
Few Republicans have made it onto MSNBC air during the network’s Dem convention coverage, but even that is apparently too much for Keith Olbermann. As Chris Matthews was interviewing GOP consultant Mike Murphy in the interlude between Bill Clinton and Joe Biden tonight, Olbermann could be heard off-camera angrily demanding “let’s wrap him up, alright?
5) ABCNews got in trouble with the law in Denver.
Police in Denver arrested an ABC News producer today as he and a camera crew were attempting to take pictures on a public sidewalk of Democratic senators and VIP donors leaving a private meeting at the Brown Palace Hotel.
WaPo also has the story.
Footage of the incident showed one police officer constantly pushing Eslocker as the producer walked backwards across the street, and another officer placing his hand around Eslocker’s neck. Eslocker kept saying that it was a public street and asking what law he was violating. Schneider said Esocker never entered the Brown Palace Hotel, where the meeting was taking place.
I guess he didn’t make it to the “makeshift jail” or we would have seen that.
6) At WSJ, Peggy Noonan talks about what she’s seen at the convention.
As for Bill Clinton’s speech, halfway through I thought: The Master has arrived.
I thought her comments about Hillary were very interesting and, perhaps, quite useful.
The Hillary speech was the best of her career. Toward Obama she was exactly as gracious as she is capable of being. Mrs. Clinton’s speeches are rarely notable for great lines but this one had a number of them. “It makes sense that George Bush and John McCain will be together next week in the Twin Cities, because these days they’re awfully hard to tell apart.” KAPOW. We’ll be hearing more of that one. “Sisterhood of the travelling pantsuits” – funny and self aware. She normally doesn’t use the teleprompter – actually it’s rare for her to use one — but last night she did, and she proved herself the most gifted pol on the prompter in current political history. Her statement from the floor during the rollcall? Fabulous. The decision to put Obama over the top and ask for acclamation? Masterly. Mrs. Clinton’s actions this week have been pivotal not only for Obama, but for her. She showed herself capable of appearing to put party first. I also believe she has come to appreciate both emotionally and intellectually The Importance of Being Teddy. She will not be the president of the United States the next four years, but she can ease herself into the role of Teddy Kennedy-esque fighter for her issues in the Senate. And that I think is exactly where she means to go, and what she means to be. And that, for her, is a brilliant move. Really: brilliant. Here’s one reason: Teddy is, throughout his party, beloved. Beloved would be something very new for Hillary.
About Michelle:
Michelle Obama’s speech was solid, but not a home run. First impression: She is so beautiful. Beautifully dressed, beautifully groomed, confident, smiling, a compelling person. But her speech seemed to me more the speech of a candidate, and not a candidate’s spouse. It was full of problems and issues. I continue to be of the Dennis Thatcher School of Political Spouses: Let the candidate do the seriousness of the issues, you do the excellence of the candidate. This is old fashioned but nonetheless I think still applicable. It has made Laura Bush (with a few forays into relatively anodyne policy questions) the most popular First Lady in modern American political history. Another problem with the Michelle speech. In order to paint both her professional life and her husband’s, and in order to communicate what she feels is his singular compassion, she had to paint an America that is darker, sadder, grimmer, than most Americans experience their country to be. And this of course is an incomplete picture, an incorrectly weighted picture. Sadness and struggle are part of life, but so are guts and verve and achievement and success and hardiness and…triumph. Democrats always get this wrong. Republicans get it wrong too, but in a different way.
And she mentions a great line I had not heard about:
By the way, the best line of the convention so far? Ted Strickland of Ohio, when he echoed the 1988 Democratic convention joke about George H.W. Bush, that he was born on third and thought he hit a triple. Strickland said of George W. Bush that he was born on third and then stole second. It didn’t get much attention in any of the commentary, but it’s all people were talking about in the bars of Denver that night.
Interesting.
7) Also very interesting is OpenLeft. There is some heartburn over the course of this convention.
I am feeling really frustrated today. I am sensing that something is wrong with this convention, and that there will be no bounce. I don’t know exactly what we need to do to get a bounce, but I do know that we haven’t done it yet.
After going through a couple of ideas for why there might not be a bounce, the author is still puzzled. Apparently he felt differently in 2000, when there was a bounce and the same in 2004, when there was not a bounce. The polling has him somewhat concerned.
This is very interesting. Here at NQ, we aren’t necessarily fans of what we’ve seen. But to see a partisan openly talking about this suggests something IS off. And that makes me curious.
8 ) The Atlantic seems worried too. Andrew Sullivan (I know, I know) seems concerned that this convention has made it near impossible for Obama to do well.
With the sole exception of Michelle Obama’s superb speech, this convention has been McCain’s dream. Yes, there’s Biden and the chance that someone – who knows? – might actually attack the worst national security record of any administration in modern times. And then there’s Obama on Thursday. But the way they have set up the speech all but ensures that Obama cannot defeat expectations. Maybe Obama can overcome the obstacles this setting will create. He will have to be one hell of a politician to pull this one off.
Aside from the absolute stupidity of the first sentence, it seems Sullivan’s worried. But I’m not buying it. I think this is an effort to lower expectations so that Obama can be seen as “one hell of a politician.” Don’t take this seriously.
9) At realclearpolitics, a Denver local paper talks about some of the economic and philosophical differences between the Clinton wing and the Obama wing of the party. It isn’t as dry as it sounds.
Well, it’s no wonder that Democrats didn’t want former President Bill Clinton to speak on the economy; some delegates might have had the temerity to ask: Hey, why did we experience all that prosperity in the ’90s?
It certainly wasn’t because of populism or isolationism or more government dependency or any of the hard-left economic policies being preached nightly by speakers at the Democratic National Convention.
No, it was capitalism — more of it, not less of it.
Naturally, every political convention features its share of demagoguery. But buried beneath the idealistic policy talk in Denver is an ugly detail: It’s about coercion.
This caught my eye because although economic policy can be argued from now until, well, until; the word “coercion” made an impression.
“Coercion” seems a good word to just about summarize the whole “Democratic” process so far. Many people with long-time experience in the Democratic party say this campaign is very coercive of any number of people and groups.
10) Just for fun is this piece from redstate.com. It’s a snark on MSNBC saying its Denver convention coverage is not partisan.
MSDNC has defended its coverage of the Democratic Convention as not partisan.
hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.
MSNBC is as objective as RedState, but less professional.
————————Seriously, this network operates like Howard Dean’s hand is up Keith Olbermann’s butt moving his lips.
Can’t add to that. But I will. Keith as Howard’s sock puppet? Heh.
11) Thought you might enjoy redstateupdate’s take on the Biden VP pick.
, the basis for the Best Motion Picture Nominee (Golden Globes) starring Brad Pitt.
, the novel by John Le Carre, a new motion picture starring Gary Oldman and Colin Firth.
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.by David Fredosso who wrote 2008's 
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