AP Slammed Bush’s ‘Extravagant’ Inaugural in ’05, But Now It’s Spend, Baby, Spend
By Rich Noyes
Four years ago, the Associated Press and others in the press suggested it was in poor taste for Republicans to spend $40 million on President Bush’s inauguration. AP writer Will Lester calculated the impact that kind of money would have on armoring Humvees in Iraq, helping victims of the tsunami, or paying down the deficit. Lester thought the party should be cancelled: “The questions have come from Bush supporters and opponents: Do we need to spend this money on what seems so extravagant?”
Fast forward to 2009. The nation is still at war (two wars, in fact), and now also faces the prospect of a severe recession and federal budget deficits topping $1 trillion as far as the eye can see. With Barack Obama’s inauguration estimated to cost $45 million (not counting the millions more that government will have to pay for security), is the Associated Press once again tsk-tsking the high dollar cost?
Nope. “For inaugural balls, go for glitz, forget economy,” a Tuesday AP headline advised. The article by reporter Laurie Kellman argued for extravagance [1], starting with the lede:
So you're attending an inaugural ball saluting the historic election of Barack Obama in the worst economic climate in three generations. Can you get away with glitzing it up and still be appropriate, not to mention comfortable and financially viable?
To quote the man of the hour: Yes, you can. Veteran ballgoers say you should. And fashionistas insist that you must.
"This is a time to celebrate. This is a great moment. Do not dress down. Do not wear the Washington uniform," said Tim Gunn, a native Washingtonian and Chief Creative Officer at Liz Claiborne, Inc.
"Just because the economy is in a downturn, it doesn't mean that style is going to be in a downturn," agreed Ken Downing, fashion director for Neiman Marcus.
And if anyone does raise an eyebrow at those sequins, remind them that optimism is good for times like these. "Just say you're doing it to help the economy," chuckled good manners guru Letitia Baldridge.
That spin is a far cry from four years ago, when the AP seemed interested in spurring resentment of the Bush inaugural’s supposedly high cost. Of course, displays of Republican wealth are routinely slammed by the media as elitist or aristocratic, while reporters seem to consider rich Democrats as stylish paragons whom we all should copy.
To get a real feel for the contrast, here’s an excerpt of Lester’s January 13, 2005 piece (as recounted in the MRC’s CyberAlert [2]), starting with a lede designed to rain all over Bush’s parade and including the suggestion from two liberal Democrats that Bush eat cold chicken salad and pound cake instead:
President Bush’s second inauguration will cost tens of millions of dollars — $40 million alone in private donations for the balls, parade and other invitation-only parties. With that kind of money, what could you buy?
■ 200 armored Humvees with the best armor for troops in Iraq.
■ Vaccinations and preventive health care for 22 million children in regions devastated by the tsunami.
■ A down payment on the nation’s deficit, which hit a record-breaking $412 billion last year....
The questions have come from Bush supporters and opponents: Do we need to spend this money on what seems so extravagant?
New York Rep. Anthony Weiner, a Democrat, suggested inaugural parties should be scaled back, citing as a precedent Roosevelt's inauguration during World War II.
"President Roosevelt held his 1945 inaugural at the White House, making a short speech and serving guests cold chicken salad and plain pound cake," according to a letter from Weiner and Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash. "During World War I, President Wilson did not have any parties at his 1917 inaugural, saying that such festivities would be undignified."...
Billionaire Mark Cuban, owner of the National Basketball Association's Dallas Mavericks, voted for Bush -- twice. Cuban knows a thing or two about big spending, once starring in ABC's reality TV show, "The Benefactor," in which 16 contenders tried to pass his test for success and win $1 million.
"As a country, we face huge deficits. We face a declining economy. We have service people dying. We face responsibilities to help those suffering from the...devastation of the tsunamis," he wrote on his blog, a Web journal.
Cuban challenged Bush to set an example: "Start by canceling your inauguration parties and festivities."
Obviously, that’s not the media’s message to Barack Obama this year. And no one in the press is going to argue that, with the nation at war, the new President should be satisfied with cold chicken salad and pound cake.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
US Media Absurdity 11
Sun-Times: Journalists Being Shut Out by Obama
By Warner Todd Huston
January 12, 2009 - 21:43 ET
According to Sun-Times columnist and long-time Chicago journalist, Carol Marin, journalists at Barack Obama news conferences have come to realize that Obama has pre-picked those journalists whom he will allow to ask him questions at the conference and many of them now "don't even bother raising" their hands to be called upon.
One wonders why journalists are allowing this corralling of the press? Would they have allowed George W. Bush to pre-pick journalists like that? Would they meekly sit by and allow themselves to be systematically ignored, their freedom to ask questions silenced by any Republican? Would journalists so eagerly vie with one another for the favor of Bush like they are Obama's?
For her part, it seems that Carol Marin is starting to wonder at the "bizarro world" that is being invented by the pliant and smitten Obama loving press corps.
As ferociously as we march like villagers with torches against Blagojevich, we have been, in the true spirit of the Bizarro universe, the polar opposite with the president-elect. Deferential, eager to please, prepared to keep a careful distance.
The Obama news conferences tell that story, making one yearn for the return of the always-irritating Sam Donaldson to awaken the slumbering press to the notion that decorum isn't all it's cracked up to be.
The press corps, most of us, don't even bother raising our hands any more to ask questions because Obama always has before him a list of correspondents who've been advised they will be called upon that day.
Will the rest of the press retake their manhood and again become the tough guys they have always claimed to be or are they going to stay so smitten by Obama and their love for The One that they will allow themselves to continue being forced into a subservient role?
One has a sinking suspicion that the press is allowing itself to become Obama's lapdog extraordinaire.
By Warner Todd Huston
January 12, 2009 - 21:43 ET
According to Sun-Times columnist and long-time Chicago journalist, Carol Marin, journalists at Barack Obama news conferences have come to realize that Obama has pre-picked those journalists whom he will allow to ask him questions at the conference and many of them now "don't even bother raising" their hands to be called upon.
One wonders why journalists are allowing this corralling of the press? Would they have allowed George W. Bush to pre-pick journalists like that? Would they meekly sit by and allow themselves to be systematically ignored, their freedom to ask questions silenced by any Republican? Would journalists so eagerly vie with one another for the favor of Bush like they are Obama's?
For her part, it seems that Carol Marin is starting to wonder at the "bizarro world" that is being invented by the pliant and smitten Obama loving press corps.
As ferociously as we march like villagers with torches against Blagojevich, we have been, in the true spirit of the Bizarro universe, the polar opposite with the president-elect. Deferential, eager to please, prepared to keep a careful distance.
The Obama news conferences tell that story, making one yearn for the return of the always-irritating Sam Donaldson to awaken the slumbering press to the notion that decorum isn't all it's cracked up to be.
The press corps, most of us, don't even bother raising our hands any more to ask questions because Obama always has before him a list of correspondents who've been advised they will be called upon that day.
Will the rest of the press retake their manhood and again become the tough guys they have always claimed to be or are they going to stay so smitten by Obama and their love for The One that they will allow themselves to continue being forced into a subservient role?
One has a sinking suspicion that the press is allowing itself to become Obama's lapdog extraordinaire.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
How Newspapers Tried to Invent the Web But failed.
By Jack Shafer
Jan. 6, 200
Slate - A moment of sympathy, please, for newspapers, whose readers and advertisers have been fleeing at a frightening rate.
It would be easy to accuse editors and publishers of being clueless about the coming Internet disruption and to insist that the industry's proper reward for decades of haughty attitude, bad planning, and incompetence is bankruptcy.
But newspapers have really, really tried to wrap their hands around the future and preserve their franchise, an insight I owe to Pablo J. Boczkowski's 2004 book, Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers. The industry has understood from the advent of AM radio in the 1920s that technology would eventually be its undoing and has always behaved accordingly.
For instance, publishers aggressively pursued radio licenses in the early days of broadcasting and, later, sought and acquired TV licenses when they were dispensed. As early as 1947, Walter Annenberg's Philadelphia Inquirer and John S. Knight's Miami Herald experimented with fax editions of their papers. Seems visionary enough to me.
Newspapers and other media entities started experimenting with videotex technology in the 1970s, according to David Carlson's Online Timeline. Newspapers considered themselves vulnerable to new entrants and worried aloud to anybody who would listen about falling readership. In 1979, the Knight Ridder newspaper chain established a videotex subsidiary to develop its Viewtron service, Boczkowski writes. Clunky and toylike by today's standards (see the silly, pre-Donkey Kong-quality graphics), the early system required an expensive, dedicated terminal. Yet after conducting trials in 1980, the system held sufficient promise that Knight Ridder succeeded in selling Viewtron franchises to other newspapers. More than a dozen other dailies played with videotex during the decade, including newspapers in the Times-Mirror chain, Cowles Media, and McClatchy Newspapers, as well as at the Chicago Sun-Times and the Washington Post.
Howard Finberg of the Poynter Institute remembers that Viewtron could fetch from the "Miami Herald or the New York Times the night before the paper hit your doorstep," access the Associated Press, look up airline schedules, access bank account info, and order a meal online. Not bad for the dark ages, eh?
Broadcasters joined the text fray, too. In Los Angeles during the early 1980s, CBS was testing the Extravision teletext service, and NBC was experimenting with its own offering, Tempo L.A., according to the New York Times.
So intense was the industry's devotion to videotex and so rampant its paranoia that some other medium would usurp its place in the media constellation that the American Newspaper Publishers Association lobbied Congress in 1980 to prevent AT&T from launching its own "electronic yellow pages." Washington Post Co. CEO Katharine Graham, then chair of the ANPA, and other publishers met with Sen. Robert Packwood, R-Ore., to discuss the legislation that would free AT&T to start its service.
As the Wall Street Journal would later report, Packwood said to the publishers, "What you're really worried about is an electronic Yellow Pages that will destroy your advertising base, isn't it?"
Graham's response: "You're damn right it is."
Videotex failed to catch on commercially, with Knight Ridder burning through $50 million before closing Viewtron in 1986. The industry's next favorite newsprint alternative was audiotext, and while Boczkowski writes that the format generated modest profits, it never enjoyed the wild enthusiasm that videotex did. As the decade progressed, the Chicago Tribune, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Hartford Courant, and the New York Times revisited the idea of fax newspapers. Some of the fax editions found a niche but not much more.
According to Boczkowski, newspapers didn't rush into videotex because they were visionaries in a hurry to invent the future but because they were "reactive, defensive, and pragmatic" about their mature, lucrative business. Having observed the videotex experiments in England and elsewhere, they feared that if they didn't adopt the technology or at least test it, somebody else would and displace them. Once they determined that nobody could make money from videotex and the technology posed no threat to the newsprint model, they were happy to shutter their ventures.
By the mid-1980s, the industry's biggest worry was that the PC, which had eased its way into homes and the workplace like an algae bloom, would somehow supplant them. Boczkowski acknowledges that newspapers' early online strategies were as much about blocking new competitors as beating a path to the future. That said, by the early to mid-1990s, the New York Times, the San Jose Mercury News, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and many others were producing electronic-edition business, striking deals with the burgeoning proprietary online systems, such as CompuServe, America Online, Prodigy, and Interchange, or throwing content up on bulletin board systems.
Publishers adored the proprietary online services because they locked down the user experience to the newspaper's benefit. A Washington Post spokesman quoted in Boczkowski's book applauds the way Interchange "preserves the company's direct business relationship with Post readers."
The publishers were pretty sure that proprietary online services were the next wave, but if you remember having used one, you know how badly they sucked. Let's say you subscribed to AOL to read the New York Times but wanted to read a story in the Washington Post. You couldn't get to the Post from AOL because the Post was published exclusively on Interchange. What you had to do was disconnect your screeching modem from AOL, purchase an Interchange subscription, log onto Interchange, and then navigate to the Post. A return visit to the Times required the reverse of that drill.
The extreme suckage of proprietary online services stemmed from the fact that they were "non-generative" technologies, to borrow a phrase from Jonathan Zittrain's excellent The Future of the Internet—And How To Stop It. Nongenerative technologies can't be tinkered with or otherwise improved by outsiders. The iPhone is a good example of a nongenerative device: Its software updates "actively seek out and erase" unauthorized modifications, to paraphrase Zittrain.
Generative technologies such as the PC, on the other hand, invite improvement by outsiders, making them more and more useful to users as time passes—and often more useful in ways that the original designers never would have imagined. When you connect a generative technology to a nongenerative one, you usually end up crippling the generative one.
Indeed, the proprietary online services—the AOLs and CompuServes—hobbled the PC, turning the versatile and powerful machine into a dumb terminal. It's a tribute to newspapers and their keen sense of the future that they quickly determined that the online services would never attract the masses they desired. No sooner had newspapers taken up residence on the proprietary online services than they were packing up their pixels and starting their en masse migration to the World Wide Web, which was as generative as the online services were nongenerative.
Newspapers were anything but late arrivers to the Web party, according to Carlson's Online Timeline and other sources. Among the earliest pure Web newspapers in the United States were the two dueling dailies started in San Francisco during the autumn 1994 press strike—one by union members and one by management. (As a point of reference, the high-tech sharpies at Wired spun off the Hotwired.com site in October 1994.) The San Jose Mercury News broke from AOL and started on the Web in February 1995. USA Today launched a Web edition in August 1995. Later that year, the Boston Globe started its Boston.com, and the Los Angeles Times announced plans to leave Prodigy. The New York Times and Washington Post got webby in 1996. After that, few newspapers held back. Boczkowski writes that more than 750 North American dailies were publishing on the Web in April 1998, and by July 1999 only two of the 100 largest dailies were not.
Newspapers deserve bragging rights for having homesteaded the Web long before most government agencies and major corporations knew what a URL was. Given the industry's early tenancy, deep pockets, and history of paranoid experimentation with new communication forms, one would expect to find plenty in the way of innovations and spinoffs.
But that's not the case, and I think I know why: From the beginning, newspapers sought to invent the Web in their own image by repurposing the copy, values, and temperament found in their ink-and-paper editions. Despite being early arrivals, despite having spent millions on manpower and hardware, despite all the animations, links, videos, databases, and other software tricks found on their sites, every newspaper Web site is instantly identifiable as a newspaper Web site. By succeeding, they failed to invent the Web.
Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.
Jan. 6, 200
Slate - A moment of sympathy, please, for newspapers, whose readers and advertisers have been fleeing at a frightening rate.
It would be easy to accuse editors and publishers of being clueless about the coming Internet disruption and to insist that the industry's proper reward for decades of haughty attitude, bad planning, and incompetence is bankruptcy.
But newspapers have really, really tried to wrap their hands around the future and preserve their franchise, an insight I owe to Pablo J. Boczkowski's 2004 book, Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers. The industry has understood from the advent of AM radio in the 1920s that technology would eventually be its undoing and has always behaved accordingly.
For instance, publishers aggressively pursued radio licenses in the early days of broadcasting and, later, sought and acquired TV licenses when they were dispensed. As early as 1947, Walter Annenberg's Philadelphia Inquirer and John S. Knight's Miami Herald experimented with fax editions of their papers. Seems visionary enough to me.
Newspapers and other media entities started experimenting with videotex technology in the 1970s, according to David Carlson's Online Timeline. Newspapers considered themselves vulnerable to new entrants and worried aloud to anybody who would listen about falling readership. In 1979, the Knight Ridder newspaper chain established a videotex subsidiary to develop its Viewtron service, Boczkowski writes. Clunky and toylike by today's standards (see the silly, pre-Donkey Kong-quality graphics), the early system required an expensive, dedicated terminal. Yet after conducting trials in 1980, the system held sufficient promise that Knight Ridder succeeded in selling Viewtron franchises to other newspapers. More than a dozen other dailies played with videotex during the decade, including newspapers in the Times-Mirror chain, Cowles Media, and McClatchy Newspapers, as well as at the Chicago Sun-Times and the Washington Post.
Howard Finberg of the Poynter Institute remembers that Viewtron could fetch from the "Miami Herald or the New York Times the night before the paper hit your doorstep," access the Associated Press, look up airline schedules, access bank account info, and order a meal online. Not bad for the dark ages, eh?
Broadcasters joined the text fray, too. In Los Angeles during the early 1980s, CBS was testing the Extravision teletext service, and NBC was experimenting with its own offering, Tempo L.A., according to the New York Times.
So intense was the industry's devotion to videotex and so rampant its paranoia that some other medium would usurp its place in the media constellation that the American Newspaper Publishers Association lobbied Congress in 1980 to prevent AT&T from launching its own "electronic yellow pages." Washington Post Co. CEO Katharine Graham, then chair of the ANPA, and other publishers met with Sen. Robert Packwood, R-Ore., to discuss the legislation that would free AT&T to start its service.
As the Wall Street Journal would later report, Packwood said to the publishers, "What you're really worried about is an electronic Yellow Pages that will destroy your advertising base, isn't it?"
Graham's response: "You're damn right it is."
Videotex failed to catch on commercially, with Knight Ridder burning through $50 million before closing Viewtron in 1986. The industry's next favorite newsprint alternative was audiotext, and while Boczkowski writes that the format generated modest profits, it never enjoyed the wild enthusiasm that videotex did. As the decade progressed, the Chicago Tribune, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Hartford Courant, and the New York Times revisited the idea of fax newspapers. Some of the fax editions found a niche but not much more.
According to Boczkowski, newspapers didn't rush into videotex because they were visionaries in a hurry to invent the future but because they were "reactive, defensive, and pragmatic" about their mature, lucrative business. Having observed the videotex experiments in England and elsewhere, they feared that if they didn't adopt the technology or at least test it, somebody else would and displace them. Once they determined that nobody could make money from videotex and the technology posed no threat to the newsprint model, they were happy to shutter their ventures.
By the mid-1980s, the industry's biggest worry was that the PC, which had eased its way into homes and the workplace like an algae bloom, would somehow supplant them. Boczkowski acknowledges that newspapers' early online strategies were as much about blocking new competitors as beating a path to the future. That said, by the early to mid-1990s, the New York Times, the San Jose Mercury News, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and many others were producing electronic-edition business, striking deals with the burgeoning proprietary online systems, such as CompuServe, America Online, Prodigy, and Interchange, or throwing content up on bulletin board systems.
Publishers adored the proprietary online services because they locked down the user experience to the newspaper's benefit. A Washington Post spokesman quoted in Boczkowski's book applauds the way Interchange "preserves the company's direct business relationship with Post readers."
The publishers were pretty sure that proprietary online services were the next wave, but if you remember having used one, you know how badly they sucked. Let's say you subscribed to AOL to read the New York Times but wanted to read a story in the Washington Post. You couldn't get to the Post from AOL because the Post was published exclusively on Interchange. What you had to do was disconnect your screeching modem from AOL, purchase an Interchange subscription, log onto Interchange, and then navigate to the Post. A return visit to the Times required the reverse of that drill.
The extreme suckage of proprietary online services stemmed from the fact that they were "non-generative" technologies, to borrow a phrase from Jonathan Zittrain's excellent The Future of the Internet—And How To Stop It. Nongenerative technologies can't be tinkered with or otherwise improved by outsiders. The iPhone is a good example of a nongenerative device: Its software updates "actively seek out and erase" unauthorized modifications, to paraphrase Zittrain.
Generative technologies such as the PC, on the other hand, invite improvement by outsiders, making them more and more useful to users as time passes—and often more useful in ways that the original designers never would have imagined. When you connect a generative technology to a nongenerative one, you usually end up crippling the generative one.
Indeed, the proprietary online services—the AOLs and CompuServes—hobbled the PC, turning the versatile and powerful machine into a dumb terminal. It's a tribute to newspapers and their keen sense of the future that they quickly determined that the online services would never attract the masses they desired. No sooner had newspapers taken up residence on the proprietary online services than they were packing up their pixels and starting their en masse migration to the World Wide Web, which was as generative as the online services were nongenerative.
Newspapers were anything but late arrivers to the Web party, according to Carlson's Online Timeline and other sources. Among the earliest pure Web newspapers in the United States were the two dueling dailies started in San Francisco during the autumn 1994 press strike—one by union members and one by management. (As a point of reference, the high-tech sharpies at Wired spun off the Hotwired.com site in October 1994.) The San Jose Mercury News broke from AOL and started on the Web in February 1995. USA Today launched a Web edition in August 1995. Later that year, the Boston Globe started its Boston.com, and the Los Angeles Times announced plans to leave Prodigy. The New York Times and Washington Post got webby in 1996. After that, few newspapers held back. Boczkowski writes that more than 750 North American dailies were publishing on the Web in April 1998, and by July 1999 only two of the 100 largest dailies were not.
Newspapers deserve bragging rights for having homesteaded the Web long before most government agencies and major corporations knew what a URL was. Given the industry's early tenancy, deep pockets, and history of paranoid experimentation with new communication forms, one would expect to find plenty in the way of innovations and spinoffs.
But that's not the case, and I think I know why: From the beginning, newspapers sought to invent the Web in their own image by repurposing the copy, values, and temperament found in their ink-and-paper editions. Despite being early arrivals, despite having spent millions on manpower and hardware, despite all the animations, links, videos, databases, and other software tricks found on their sites, every newspaper Web site is instantly identifiable as a newspaper Web site. By succeeding, they failed to invent the Web.
Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.
Monday, January 5, 2009
US Media Election Absurdity 10
Funny Business in Minnesota
In which every dubious ruling seems to help Al Franken.
JANUARY 5, 2009
Wall Street Journal - Strange things keep happening in Minnesota, where the disputed recount in the Senate race between Norm Coleman and Al Franken may be nearing a dubious outcome. Thanks to the machinations of Democratic Secretary of State Mark Ritchie and a meek state Canvassing Board, Mr. Franken may emerge as an illegitimate victor.
Mr. Franken started the recount 215 votes behind Senator Coleman, but he now claims a 225-vote lead and suddenly the man who was insisting on "counting every vote" wants to shut the process down. He's getting help from Mr. Ritchie and his four fellow Canvassing Board members, who have delivered inconsistent rulings and are ignoring glaring problems with the tallies.
Under Minnesota law, election officials are required to make a duplicate ballot if the original is damaged during Election Night counting. Officials are supposed to mark these as "duplicate" and segregate the original ballots. But it appears some officials may have failed to mark ballots as duplicates, which are now being counted in addition to the originals. This helps explain why more than 25 precincts now have more ballots than voters who signed in to vote. By some estimates this double counting has yielded Mr. Franken an additional 80 to 100 votes.
This disenfranchises Minnesotans whose vote counted only once. And one Canvassing Board member, State Supreme Court Justice G. Barry Anderson, has acknowledged that "very likely there was a double counting." Yet the board insists that it lacks the authority to question local officials and it is merely adding the inflated numbers to the totals.
In other cases, the board has been flagrantly inconsistent. Last month, Mr. Franken's campaign charged that one Hennepin County (Minneapolis) precinct had "lost" 133 votes, since the hand recount showed fewer ballots than machine votes recorded on Election Night. Though there is no proof to this missing vote charge -- officials may have accidentally run the ballots through the machine twice on Election Night -- the Canvassing Board chose to go with the Election Night total, rather than the actual number of ballots in the recount. That decision gave Mr. Franken a gain of 46 votes.
Meanwhile, a Ramsey County precinct ended up with 177 more ballots than there were recorded votes on Election Night. In that case, the board decided to go with the extra ballots, rather than the Election Night total, even though the county is now showing more ballots than voters in the precinct. This gave Mr. Franken a net gain of 37 votes, which means he's benefited both ways from the board's inconsistency.
And then there are the absentee ballots. The Franken campaign initially howled that some absentee votes had been erroneously rejected by local officials. Counties were supposed to review their absentees and create a list of those they believed were mistakenly rejected. Many Franken-leaning counties did so, submitting 1,350 ballots to include in the results. But many Coleman-leaning counties have yet to complete a re-examination. Despite this lack of uniformity, and though the state Supreme Court has yet to rule on a Coleman request to standardize this absentee review, Mr. Ritchie's office nonetheless plowed through the incomplete pile of 1,350 absentees this weekend, padding Mr. Franken's edge by a further 176 votes.
Both campaigns have also suggested that Mr. Ritchie's office made mistakes in tabulating votes that had been challenged by either of the campaigns. And the Canvassing Board appears to have applied inconsistent standards in how it decided some of these challenged votes -- in ways that, again on net, have favored Mr. Franken.
The question is how the board can certify a fair and accurate election result given these multiple recount problems. Yet that is precisely what the five members seem prepared to do when they meet today. Some members seem to have concluded that because one of the candidates will challenge the result in any event, why not get on with it and leave it to the courts? Mr. Coleman will certainly have grounds to contest the result in court, but he'll be at a disadvantage given that courts are understandably reluctant to overrule a certified outcome.
Meanwhile, Minnesota's other Senator, Amy Klobuchar, is already saying her fellow Democrats should seat Mr. Franken when the 111th Congress begins this week if the Canvassing Board certifies him as the winner. This contradicts Minnesota law, which says the state cannot award a certificate of election if one party contests the results. Ms. Klobuchar is trying to create the public perception of a fait accompli, all the better to make Mr. Coleman look like a sore loser and build pressure on him to drop his legal challenge despite the funny recount business.
Minnesotans like to think that their state isn't like New Jersey or Louisiana, and typically it isn't. But we can't recall a similar recount involving optical scanning machines that has changed so many votes, and in which nearly every crucial decision worked to the advantage of the same candidate. The Coleman campaign clearly misjudged the politics here, and the apparent willingness of a partisan like Mr. Ritchie to help his preferred candidate, Mr. Franken. If the Canvassing Board certifies Mr. Franken as the winner based on the current count, it will be anointing a tainted and undeserving Senator.
In which every dubious ruling seems to help Al Franken.
JANUARY 5, 2009
Wall Street Journal - Strange things keep happening in Minnesota, where the disputed recount in the Senate race between Norm Coleman and Al Franken may be nearing a dubious outcome. Thanks to the machinations of Democratic Secretary of State Mark Ritchie and a meek state Canvassing Board, Mr. Franken may emerge as an illegitimate victor.
Mr. Franken started the recount 215 votes behind Senator Coleman, but he now claims a 225-vote lead and suddenly the man who was insisting on "counting every vote" wants to shut the process down. He's getting help from Mr. Ritchie and his four fellow Canvassing Board members, who have delivered inconsistent rulings and are ignoring glaring problems with the tallies.
Under Minnesota law, election officials are required to make a duplicate ballot if the original is damaged during Election Night counting. Officials are supposed to mark these as "duplicate" and segregate the original ballots. But it appears some officials may have failed to mark ballots as duplicates, which are now being counted in addition to the originals. This helps explain why more than 25 precincts now have more ballots than voters who signed in to vote. By some estimates this double counting has yielded Mr. Franken an additional 80 to 100 votes.
This disenfranchises Minnesotans whose vote counted only once. And one Canvassing Board member, State Supreme Court Justice G. Barry Anderson, has acknowledged that "very likely there was a double counting." Yet the board insists that it lacks the authority to question local officials and it is merely adding the inflated numbers to the totals.
In other cases, the board has been flagrantly inconsistent. Last month, Mr. Franken's campaign charged that one Hennepin County (Minneapolis) precinct had "lost" 133 votes, since the hand recount showed fewer ballots than machine votes recorded on Election Night. Though there is no proof to this missing vote charge -- officials may have accidentally run the ballots through the machine twice on Election Night -- the Canvassing Board chose to go with the Election Night total, rather than the actual number of ballots in the recount. That decision gave Mr. Franken a gain of 46 votes.
Meanwhile, a Ramsey County precinct ended up with 177 more ballots than there were recorded votes on Election Night. In that case, the board decided to go with the extra ballots, rather than the Election Night total, even though the county is now showing more ballots than voters in the precinct. This gave Mr. Franken a net gain of 37 votes, which means he's benefited both ways from the board's inconsistency.
And then there are the absentee ballots. The Franken campaign initially howled that some absentee votes had been erroneously rejected by local officials. Counties were supposed to review their absentees and create a list of those they believed were mistakenly rejected. Many Franken-leaning counties did so, submitting 1,350 ballots to include in the results. But many Coleman-leaning counties have yet to complete a re-examination. Despite this lack of uniformity, and though the state Supreme Court has yet to rule on a Coleman request to standardize this absentee review, Mr. Ritchie's office nonetheless plowed through the incomplete pile of 1,350 absentees this weekend, padding Mr. Franken's edge by a further 176 votes.
Both campaigns have also suggested that Mr. Ritchie's office made mistakes in tabulating votes that had been challenged by either of the campaigns. And the Canvassing Board appears to have applied inconsistent standards in how it decided some of these challenged votes -- in ways that, again on net, have favored Mr. Franken.
The question is how the board can certify a fair and accurate election result given these multiple recount problems. Yet that is precisely what the five members seem prepared to do when they meet today. Some members seem to have concluded that because one of the candidates will challenge the result in any event, why not get on with it and leave it to the courts? Mr. Coleman will certainly have grounds to contest the result in court, but he'll be at a disadvantage given that courts are understandably reluctant to overrule a certified outcome.
Meanwhile, Minnesota's other Senator, Amy Klobuchar, is already saying her fellow Democrats should seat Mr. Franken when the 111th Congress begins this week if the Canvassing Board certifies him as the winner. This contradicts Minnesota law, which says the state cannot award a certificate of election if one party contests the results. Ms. Klobuchar is trying to create the public perception of a fait accompli, all the better to make Mr. Coleman look like a sore loser and build pressure on him to drop his legal challenge despite the funny recount business.
Minnesotans like to think that their state isn't like New Jersey or Louisiana, and typically it isn't. But we can't recall a similar recount involving optical scanning machines that has changed so many votes, and in which nearly every crucial decision worked to the advantage of the same candidate. The Coleman campaign clearly misjudged the politics here, and the apparent willingness of a partisan like Mr. Ritchie to help his preferred candidate, Mr. Franken. If the Canvassing Board certifies Mr. Franken as the winner based on the current count, it will be anointing a tainted and undeserving Senator.
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