Bryan Keefer

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Bryan Keefer is a bestselling author and Director of Product at The Daily Beast. [read more]

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Online

Category: Politics

Two Panels

I’ll be moderating a panel at the Strand bookstore in downtown New York next Tuesday the 14th about the politics of food and the environmental and social impact of the things we eat. Panelists will include Sam Fromartz, author of Organic, Inc., Tim Fitzgerald of Environmental Defense, and Makalé Faber of Slow Food USA. 7:00, free.

I’ll also in Sacramento, California on November 15 for a panel hosted by the Commonwealth Club, discussing what television can do to help reinvigorate politics. I’m told the program (which is free to attend) will be podcasted shortly afterward, and that CSPAN will be taping for later broadcast. And continuing on the food theme, you can get a free lunch if you make a (free) reservation!

Green by Design

Tomorrow night, June 28, I’ll be hosting a panel at the 92nd St. Y/Makor called “Green by Design,” about next-wave enrivonmentalism. The panelists are Dominic Muren, a contributor to TreeHugger.com, Robert Freney, author of Pulse: The Coming Age of Systems and Machines Inspired by Living Things (a friend’s review: “It changed my life!"), and Yael Alkalay, the founder and CEO of red flower.

The (Rhetorical) State of Nevada

I’ll be appearing on “State of Nevada” on KNPR radio Wednesday the 15th at 9 AM Pacific/noon Eastern time, discussing how politicians speak and why it fails to engage young people. I promise it will be less abstract than it sounds. You can listen in via the program’s Web site, and I’m told it will also be archived for downloading and podcasting later in the day.

[Update: True to their word, the good folks at KNPR have uploaded the interview in your choice of streaming and downloadable audio formats.]

Related: CJR Daily now has its own podcast (XML feed, iTunes Music Store link, or direct link to the latest episode). Be the first kid on your block to use it to drown out the crazy guy on the subway trying to convert you to something!

All the President’s Spin: Now With Searchable Online Goodness!

At long last, you can search All the President’s Spin on Google Books. (Just like you always wanted!)

I know most publishers and even some authors are freaked out about Google Books (though our publisher, Simon and Schuster, is allowing authors to opt in). But it’s basically the same as Amazon’s “Inside the Book” search; Google just managed to bungle the PR aspect of things by asking publishers to opt out of the program rather than opt in, as Amazon did.

When you get down to it, though, Google Books is going to be good for both authors and publishers. It’s the same principle as radio (which is now the number one driver of music sales): The more people are exposed to content, the more likely they are to buy it.

Yahoo Music on Holiday

I have a soft spot in my heart for really perverse uses of songs in television commercials. For example, Carnival Cruise Lines has a commercial where a nice, middle-class white family frolics about to the tune of “Lust for Life” by Iggy Pop which, in its original version, includes lyrics like “Here comes Johnny in again / With liquor and drugs” and “Of course I’ve had it in my ear before.”

But Carnival at least has the sense to edit out the naughty bits.

Yahoo Music has a new commercial up featuring a song from Green Day called “Holiday” that’s blatantly Bush-bashing. The chorus, which they play during the commercial, is:

I beg to dream and differ from the hollow lies
This is the dawning of the rest of our lives
On holiday

The song itself also includes this bit (which they don’t include in the commercial):

Zieg Heil to the president gasman,
Bombs away is your punishment,
Pulverize the Eiffel tower,
Who criticize your government,
Bang, Bang goes the broken glass and,
Kill all the fags that don’t agree,
Trials by fire, setting fires,
Cuz’ that’s the way that’s meant for me,
Just cause,
Just cause because we’re outlaws, yeaahhh!

If it were 2004, I guarantee Bill O’Reilly would be up in arms.

Process, Not Product

It’s always fun watching the White House try and shift the goalposts on the war in Iraq. The rationale for the war started out, of course, as weapons of mass destruction/ties to terrorism/Saddam was a mean, nasty guy. (Also something about troops being showered with flowers and candy by nubile young women.) Then it was keeping the terrorists out of our streets. Then it was bringing democracy to the Middle East (which is turning out to be a long, hard slog). Then it was staying the course in order to demonstrate that we’ll stay the course.

The whole thing keeps getting more and more self-referential. The new incarnation is: We have to stay there to fight the terrorists blowing people up on the streets who weren’t blowing people up on the streets before we get there. (Yeah, I know Saddam was a bad guy, but I thought that’s why we wanted to get rid of him, not replace him with suicide bombers.)

Here’s Bush last Sunday:

This course is going to be difficult largely because the terrorists have chosen to wage war against a future of freedom. They are waging war against peace in Iraq. As democracy in Iraq takes root, the enemies of freedom, the terrorists, will become more desperate, more despicable, and more vicious.

Just last week, the terrorists called for the death of anyone, including women and the elderly, who supports the democratic process in Iraq. They have deliberately targeted children receiving candy from soldiers. They have targeted election workers registering Iraqis to vote. They have targeted hospital workers who are caring for the wounded. We can expect such atrocities to increase in the coming months because the enemy knows that its greatest defeat lies in the expression of free people, and freely enacted laws, and at the ballot box.

We will stand with the Iraqi people. It’s in our interest to stand with the Iraqi people. It’s in our interest to lay the foundation of peace. We’ll help them confront this barbarism, and we will triumph over the terrorist’s dark ideology of hatred and fear.

The other rationale floated recently is just as self-referential: Because soldiers have died in Iraq, we should stay and fight. Bush today: “In this war, some of our best citizens have made the ultimate sacrifice. We mourn the loss of every life. We pray for their loved ones. And we will honor their sacrifice by completing the mission and laying the foundation for peace.”

Of course, by that rationale, we should never stop doing anything, because we’ve already invested time and/or money doing it. (Can’t end those subsidies to groundhog ranches—think of all those groundhogs, and groundhog farmers, who have spent their lives groundhog farming!)

It’s sort of evil genius, though—if you make the war about the process of the war, rather than the outcome (or the reason you started it in the first place), there’s no logical way to argue against it. Then you can just suggest that everyone who doesn’t like the way it’s going wants to “cut and run,” or hates freedom, or hates puppies and flowers and candy and babies.

Gitmo: We’re Just Lookin’ For That Lost Shaker of Salt

From Dick Cheney’s interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN last night:

[Cheney] also defended the treatment of prisoners by the U.S. military at Guantanamo, telling Blitzer, “There isn’t any other nation in the world that would treat people who were determined to kill Americans the way we’re treating these people.”

”They’re living in the tropics. They’re well fed. They’ve got everything they could possibly want,” the vice president said.

See? They’re just wastin’ away in Margaritaville!

The State of the Union is free - free, I tell you, free!

According to the transcript of the (ongoing) State of the Union address, Bush has said/will say “free” or “freedom” 27 times (and that’s actually down from his inaugural address). (Addendum: There’s a fun State of the Union parsing tool at style.org.)

Quick spin highlights/lowlights:

Bush says he’ll “cut the deficit in half”: That’s based on a year-old projection of what it would be, not what the deficit currently is (which is far lower than the projection). And that “half” claim doesn’t include the cost of the Social Security accounts Bush is pushing so hard (among other things).

Social Security: The system isn’t going to be “bankrupt” as Bush just suggested. In 2042 or 2052, depending on whose projections you like, the system will only be able to pay 73 percent of the benefits promised under current law. That’s a problem, but it’s hardly “bankrupt.” (And for more on the language Bush used to describe the accounts, check out this article on CJR Daily).

Finally, I find it somehow fitting that cable company Adelphia, on the eve of the SOTU, announced that it will begin selling triple-X porn on pay-per-view in Los Angeles (and credit to the LA Times for delineating, in detail, the differences between single-, double- and triple-X porn).

Blue states, indeed.

Freedom - lots and lots and lots of freedom

Fun facts: About 2.5 percent of the words in Bush’s inaugural address were either “freedom” or “liberty,” or some varient. (I counted 27 “freedom"s, 15 “liberty"s and another 7 “free"s, adding up to 49 words out of 2083 total).

Freedom is clearly on the march—at least through the White House teleprompter.

They must not teach “rocks for jocks” at Yale

I’m a little late on this one, but here’s a pretty stunning excerpt from President Bush’s press conference last Wednesday:

Q: Mr. President, are you confident that the U.S. west coast residents—Hawaiian residents, Alaska residents—are well enough protected with early warning systems for possible tsunamis affecting this country and coastal --

The President: No, I appreciate that question, it’s a—I think that part of the long-term strategy in how to deal with natural disaster is to make sure we have—“we,” the world, has a proper tsunami warning system. ... I can’t answer your question specifically, do we have enough of a warning system for the west coast. I am going to—I am now asking that to our agencies and government to let us know. I mean, that’s a very legitimate question. ...

Q: ... [D]oes it concern you that we may not have that mechanism in place? Or is this something we can use through our civil defense air raid siren system?

The President: I just have to look into it, that’s a very legitimate question. I am on the—I presume that we are in pretty good shape. I think our location in the world is such that we may be less vulnerable than other parts, but I am not a geologist, as you know. But I think it’s a very legitimate question.

By “location” I guess he doesn’t mean the Cascadia subduction zone that could drop a http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/12/29/WARNING.TMP">40-foot tsunami on the west coast, or that fault zone up in Alaska that produced a magnitude 9.2 earthquake and subsequent tsunami in 1964.

And I guess he wasn’t watching the World Series in 1989 . . . after all, the Rangers weren’t in it.

Barney Cam reviewed

The White House has released its annual Christmas video starring Barney, the president’s Scottish terrier. It’s kind of surreal; the way they use a Steadicam to follow the dog around the White House reminds me of that eerie scene with the kid on the Big Wheel in “The Shining” right before Jack Nicholson goes nuts.

Odder still: In the second scene, President Bush, kneeling on the floor of the Oval Office, tells the dog (who is about ten inches tall), “Barney, I know you wanted to be in my Cabinet. But I’ve already given you an important job! Your job is to take care of Miss Beazley [the new White House dog]. ... And I don’t want you chasing Willie [the White House cat] around the house any more, you understand that? I’m countin’ on you.” I’m thinking there’s a hidden message in there about Bush’s second term ("I’ve given you a very important job, Jonny—take care of Miss Beazley!").

And then there’s a scene in the press room where Barney yelps to get called on to ask a question, and then just growls at Press Secretary Scott McClellan when he gets picked. I think that pretty much speaks for itself ...

Update: I have more on the press angle at CJR Daily.

Political grab bag

The final Spinsanity column for the Philadelphia Inquirer is out, judging the press’ performance at keeping the candidates honest this election season (short version: Not very good. And run those fact-checking pieces on the front page, not A27!).

Meanwhile, over on Campaign Desk, I have a post about the Associated Press already messing up the numbers on Social Security privatization, missing the mark by a couple of trillion dollars or so (as a colleague once put it, these sorts of stories are “BBI: Boring But Important").

And if you haven’t had your fill of post-election punditry yet, Campaign Desk is doing a big series on the failings of the press during the 2004 campaign.

Take that, Maureen Dowd!

A moment of unabashed gloating: All the President’s Spin is an Amazon.com editor’s pick for one of the top ten political books of the year. Take that, Maureen Dowd (and Michael Moore, and Swift Boat Veterans for “Truth,” and Graydon Carter, etc., etc.)!

One more analysis of why Bush won

Not that anyone really needs one more take on how Bush won this election, but since this is a blog, and that’s what bloggers do, here’s my analysis:

The red states got redder. Bush did better than 2000 in critical states he carried last time around. Republicans were more energized than Democrats. Everyone is pointing to a question in the national exit poll where 22 percent of voters told pollsters their number one issue in casting their vote was “moral values,” and that 81 percent of those who said that picked Bush. Certainly, conservative social values played an important part. But Bush did just as well among people who picked terrorism as their top issue (19 percent of the electorate).

Looking at what voters cited as their “most important quality” in their candidate, however, only eight percent of voters picked religious faith. Twenty-four percent said their most important quality was “will bring change” (Kerry landslide there, unsurprisingly). The key numbers, though: Seventeen percent picked “clear stand on the issues” (78 percent of them voted for Bush), 17 percent said “strong leader” (87 percent of them picked Bush), and 11 percent said “honest/trustworthy” (71 percent for Bush). So based on that, one could make the argument that this election was as much about leadership qualities (which could certainly qualify as “moral values") as it was about social issues.

Which leads me to another point: The spin worked for Bush. Those numbers suggest that the “flip-flop” charge that the Bush campaign wielded so aggressively was absolutely devastating to Kerry. (The press, I would argue, didn’t reinforce that charge as they did with some of the more spurious attacks on Gore in 2000, but they didn’t examine it critically until October.) Combined with the Bush campaign’s unending distortions of Kerry’s record (350/98 votes for higher taxes, saying Kerry thought of terrorism as a “nuisance,” attempts to suggest dissent weakened America, etc.). Certainly, some of the blame lies with the Kerry campaign for failing to effectively counter these charges (and for failing to articulate their candidates’ positions on the issues clearly). But the Bush attempts to define Kerry negatively—often unfairly—worked: 50 percent of voters told exit pollsters they had an unfavorable impression of Kerry.

And if you want to know what the next four years are going to look like in terms of political debate and spin, there’s always my book ...

Me on Polarization in the Media

From a July 19, 2004 Christian Science Monitor article:

As liberals and conservatives clash more sharply, some Americans are taking things into their own hands to cut through the bloviation. People like Bryan Keefer. At age 21, he was appalled by the vitriol on both sides of the 2000 election fray over Florida ballots. So he and some friends started spinsanity.com, a blog on the Internet that attempts to cull the wheat from the political chaff. The site took off, and is now a mainstay for many politicos.

“We are specifically nonpartisan, we consider ourselves sort of the umpires, we call it as we see it,” he says. They’ve taken on both Michael Moore’s innuendo in “Fahrenheit 9/11” and George W. Bush’s selective use of facts—what Mr. Keefer calls the “strategically dishonest talking points.”

Every week now in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Spinsanity has a column critiquing two claims, one from the left and one from the right. “We’re holding everyone accountable,” says Keefer, who is now also the assistant managing editor of CampaignDesk.org, which is run by the Columbia Journalism Review.

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