micah.sifry.com

I’ve been too busy to get deep into the swirl of charges and canards that have been flying around the progressive blogosphere ever since the YearlyKos conference in Las Vegas, and plenty of other people are doing a good job of rebutting the worst (such as David Brooks’ ridiculous NYT column that called readers of DailyKos “cultists” and “rabid sheep.”) But when I saw my old Nation colleague Christopher Hitchens adding to the muck by telling listeners of the Hugh Hewitt show that Kossacks were conspiracy nuts of the worst order, I felt the need to write him an email and try to correct at least one small piece of the record. Here’s our email exchange. I wish it were more satisfactory.

Christopher–

Longtime no speak. I hope you and yours are well.

Someone sent me this transcript from you on the Hugh Hewitt show and I was pretty amazed by what you said about the DailyKos folks. I bolded it below. The source is here: http://www.radioblogger.com/#001710

I write as your friend. I think you are completely ill-informed about the people who were at YearlyKos and what they believe. I was there in Las Vegas. I spoke on a panel on election reform. The audience was serious and focused on real problems and solutions. There was nobody making claims that Bush blew up the World Trade Center, etc. Nor did I see anyone selling videos and books making such claims.

Christopher, we don’t agree on everything but I have always thought of you as fiercely honest. Perhaps the person who transcribed the show got it wrong. Did you really say this? Do you believe it?

All best,

Micah

HH: There is a debate underway in the United States Senate this day, and joining me to discuss that debate, Christopher Hitchens, contributor columnist to Slate, as well as to Vanity Fair, and many other places that you can read his work. Christopher Hitchens, have you been following the debate in the Senate?

CH: No.

HH: Well, I’m going to make you do it. I hate to inflict this on you, but…

CH: I mean, I do follow the debates, but I haven’t today been doing so.

HH: Well, I’ve got lots of tape of Hillary, and Christopher Dodd, and Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden. And I thought it would be useful to our audience if you could respond in real time to the various assertions made by these Senators. And I’d like to start with Senator Clinton. Cut number 8, please:

HRC: Let’s be clear about what this debate is about. My friends on the other side of the aisle believe that the status quo is working in Iraq. They do not believe we need a fundamental change in policy. They choose to continue blindly following the president. We Democrats disagree. We believe we need a new direction in Iraq that will increase the chances for success on the ground. Now I may disagree with those who call for a date certain, for a withdrawal, but I do not doubt their patriotism. I may disagree with those who believe in an unconditional commitment without end, but I do not doubt their patriotism, either. Sadly, however, there are those who do doubt the patriotism of many who raise serious questions about this war.

HH: Christopher Hitchens, are you aware of such people?

CH: Yes, Mrs. Clinton, had she been in Las Vegas for the Kos conference, could have met them for herself. They’re a very large force in her own party. These are people who think George Bush blew up the World Trade Center, and the Pentagon, openly say so, and circulate books and videos to that effect, and hold conferences to try and prove it, people who compare the Zarqawi gangsters in Iraq to the American founding fathers and the Minutemen, and who, well, shall I…do I need say more?



Here’s Hitchens’ reply:

Dear Micah,

You are right twice: I am both honest and fierce.

And I was wrong to conflate the DK people with the Chicago conference on 9/11, and you can tell anyone that I said so. It’s partly the exigency of radio, but I shall make sure to tell Hewitt, if he asks me again, to let me make a clarification and distinction.

It can’t be a completely clean distinction, because many of the DK types do believe that Bush did the WTC and the Pentagon, was holding OBL for an October surprise in 2004 and all the rest of it. The Nation and its publishing arm have circulated the same trash, under Vidal’s name and in a book by some Frenchman. Michael Moore has not been denounced by the anti-war movement for what he said about the Minutemen, nor have Galloway and Ramsey Clark been disowned for acting as mouthpieces for the Ba’ath.

However, this doesn’t license me to say anything I please, and you are free to show this email to anyone.

I hope you thrive.

As always,

Fraternally

Christopher

- – -

I titled this post “Hitchens Retracts (Sort Of)” because his reply is hardly a full apology. “Many of the DK [DailyKos] types do believe that Bush did the WTC and the Pentagon” is still an unfounded slander. And his conflation of whatever stupid things The Nation’s publishing arm, Michael Moore, Gore Vidal, George Galloway and Ramsey Clark may publish or believe with the “DK types” believe is just plain sloppy reasoning. What do any of them have to do with the DailyKos community of 90,000 diarists? Last I checked not one of the people Hitchens named was a registered diarist at DailyKos, and I don’t think Markos Moulitsas or any of his guest editors has ever endorsed any of those views. Requiring people to denounce other people’s views and them chastising them for failure to do so is a slippery slope, is it not Christopher? Far better to hold people responsible for what they do say, no?

UPDATE: On his next appearance on the Hugh Hewitt show, Hitchens did as promised:

HH:….I want to give you a chance to what? Make nice with the Daily Kos crowd?

CH: Yeah, why not? Just to show how furry I am. No, seriously, Hugh, if I can call you that, last week, when you asked me about Hillary Clinton’s allegations and accusations of unpatriotism and so on, and I said well, if she’d been in Las Vegas, she could have heard all these people talking about how Bush did 9/11, and all of that. And in my mind, I was partly thinking of this other convention that had recently taken place, or is about to take place in Chicago, of all the people who say the administration pre-arranged the whole thing. And though there are some people who overlap in these camps, it isn’t fair, wasn’t fair of me to say that the Daily Kos promulgates that kind of stuff. So I thought…a couple of people wrote to me quite decently about it, and I thought I just ought to take the opportunity.

HH: I saw that. Micah Sifry is one of them, and he’s a very fine guy, actually. He’s wrong…

CH: Yeah, he’s very good, yeah.

HH: He’s wrong about most things, but he’s a very fine guy. On the other hand, I don’t want you to apologize too broadly. It was, after all, Kos who accused Marty Peretz of being the Joe Lieberman-loving, neocon owner. That’s a little code there for you. And…

CH: Well, right. You know what? I mean, there’s nothing factually wrong with that.

HH: Nothing factually, but what do you think he intended?

CH: Not only that, but Al Gore-loving.

HH: But what did you think he intended to intimate there?

CH: Even worse. No, look. Some of the ways the Daily Kos expressed itself are quite repellent to me, and I don’t take any of that back. But there was a specific innuendo that I didn’t mean, and that isn’t fair.

That Hugh Hewitt character…he’s a very nice guy, even if he is wrong about most things.

And Hitchens used this little episode as the jumping-off point for one of his typically challenging and infuriating columns in Slate. Challenging because he asks hard questions of critics of the Iraq War; infuriating because he’s arguing with a straw man made of the furthest-out reaches of the anti-war movement.

The vibe at YearlyKos, the first-ever face-to-face convening of about 1000-1500 members and fans of the country#039s most popular political website, is very much like a summer-camp re-union among people who have never met each other before. But the event also embodies a tectonic shift in the way power works in America, in that Markos Moulitsas#039s website, which attracts close to a million readers a day, has spawned a popular movement strong enough to attract the attendance of the top leadership of the Democratic party (Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Howard Dean) along with several of its 2008 contenders (Mark Warner and Wesley Clark), and with that has come the creme-de-la-creme of the nation#039s political press.

Yesterday, at the MyDD caucus, I spotted Maureen Dowd, Adam Nagourney and Adam Cohen of the New York Times, Dan Balz of the Washington Post, Dick Polman of the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Tom Curry of MSNBC. It was smart for them to be in the room, as the people leading the discussion–Jerome Armstrong, Matt Stoller, Chris Bowers–are at the very heart of this new phenomenon called the netroots. Someone said that there is one journalist here for every eight attendees, and I don#039t doubt that.

The last time an independent political movement managed to pull in that kind of political and journalistic firepower was at the ill-fated height of Ross Perot’s United We Stand America, which, for those with long memories, held a national convention in Dallas in the summer of 1995 and compelled the attendance of the leadership of both political parties as well as just about every major presidential contender.

United We Stand America, which had two million dues-paying members at its height, was of course primarily a creation of Perot’s bulging bankroll. The netroots, which has its beating heart here this weekend, is a very different beast.

Last night, Markos gave a keynote opening speech that was full of partisan fire. But for me, it was his remarks on the underlying power shift under way that really mattered more than his jabs at Joe Lieberman or Democratic poltiical consultants. Here are a few choice excerpts:

Look at this conference! It’s the epitome of people-power. It was organized by volunteers, without impetus from a traditional “leader”. We now have the ability to support leaders wherever they may be. Leaders that would never have a chance in the traditional world of establishment politics or media. Like Gina Cooper, who was a one-woman force of nature in making this conference happen.

Who was Gina Cooper? A former teacher from Tennessee? And how did that make her qualified to plan something of this magnitude?

Of course it didn’t. No more so than I was “qualified” to write about politics.

No more so than an organic farmer named Jon Tester from nowhere Montana is “qualified” to be a United States Senator.

But people-power is a wonderful thing. Everyone can be a leader. Everyone can be a strong voice. Everyone can make a difference. There has been far too much talent, far too much passion, far too much intelligence in this country marginalized by the establishment currently stinking up Washington D.C.

And now, that talent has an outlet. It can no longer be marginalized….

We no longer have to listen and read just what the old media gatekeepers forced upon us. We can now choose amongst ourselves what information to consume.

How many of you remember Stephen Colbert’s speech at the White House Correspondents dinner?

How many of you actually saw it live?

While some may call you “losers”, I call you “visionaries”. You were there! You were there to see Colbert say, live,

“The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put ‘em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know – fiction!”

The White House press corps didn’t think that was funny. The same people who a year ago couldn’t stop laughing at Bush’s jokes about missing weapons of mass destructions scrubbed all references to Colbert in their writeups of that evening’s events.

In the past, Colbert’s viciously ironic remarks would#039ve been scrubbed from the record. But this is the age of people-powered media.

The event was immediately posted all over the web. On the following Sunday and Monday, there were 3 million downloads from YouTube. 300,000 downloads from Crooks and Liars. The C-SPAN site was down Sunday morning as I tried to access the video. And when it was posted on iTunes, it quickly became the #1 album on the site. [Emphases added.]

Markos’s closing is relevant to everyone who works in the political-technology arena, even if you disagree with his politics. He said, “Technology allows each and every one of us to be a leader, and allows us to support our new leaders wherever they may emerge.”

Amen, brother. It will be interesting to see whether the national press gets this story right.

As promised, here are my rough notes for the panel on election reform that I will be speaking on at YearlyKos, Friday morning at 8am.

Three main themes to touch on: the Problem of Money in Politics; the Clean Money Solution; Action Steps.

PROBLEM: Money is the Achilles heel of American democracy

Here are the four main reasons why we have to change how money affects elections in America.

-Campaigns are too expensive. The cost of running for office is skyrocketing, deterring many good people from even entering the process.

-Good candidates without money or connections to wealthy interests don’t have a fair chance of competing for office

-Politicians are forced to spend too much time raising money rather than devoting themselves to being public servants.

-Special interests have too much influence, while ordinary people get “good government.”

Examples abound to illustrate these points:

-Skyrocketing costs:

-In 1996, $1.6 billion was spent on the congressional and presidential elections. Eight years later, that total had more than doubled, to $3.9 billion.

-When the average cost of running and winning a seat in the House of Representatives has topped $1 million, we can longer refer to that august chamber as the “People’s House.”

-The problem is equally bad in the states. In 2004 in California, the spending on one state assembly race hit $9.9 million and another hit $9.5 million. Arnold Schwarzenegger, swept into office promising to get special interests out of Sacramento, but as Steve Lopez recently wrote, “the man is on his way to raising $150 million in three years, having scheduled a series of dinners in which it costs $100,000 just to get close enough to cut his rubber chicken.”

-Ordinary people without access to wealth are shut out

-Campaign donors are much wealthier, whiter, older, male and conservative than the general population. Not a coincidence that women, people of color and younger people are under-represented as candidates.

-Less than 1/2 of one percent of all Americans made a political contribution of $200 or more to a federal candidate in 2004. And that’s after the burst of small-donor mobilization that we saw around campaigns like Howard Dean’s and John Kerry’s.

-Of the $11 billion+ given since 1989, the vast majority came from business interests.

-Nine out of ten dollars over $200 contributed to federal candidates, parties and PACs in 2000 and 2002 came from majority non-Hispanic white zip codes

– If you were thinking of running for Congress, do you have any idea where you would get the money to be a viable candidate? (The netroots may be a partial answer, but not across the whole system. Even in a case like the Ned Lamont race, where at least $250K has been raised online, Lamont wouldn’t be credible without his ability to self-finance against Lieberman’s $7 million+)

-(side note: the cost of accessing your Congressman is also skyrocketing, doubling from $20K to $40K per month, according to the Washington Post. )

Politicians’ time:

-About one-quarter of candidates running for the U.S. House or statewide offices say they spend more than half their time raising money. A similar percentage said they spend between one-quarter and one-half of their time on fundraising. That’s time not spent talking to average voters over their kitchen tables.

Special interests winning special favors:

-Just cast your mind back over the bulk of legislation passed by Congress in the past decade:

-an energy bill that gave oil companies $12 billion in tax breaks at the same time that ExxonMobil just posted $36 billion in annual profits and your gasoline and home heating bills are at an all-time high;

-a bankruptcy “reform” bill written by credit card companies to make it harder for poor debtors to escape the burdens of divorce or medical catastrophe;

-the deregulation of the banking, securities and insurance sectors which led to rampant corporate malfeasance and greed and the destruction of the retirement plans of millions of small investors;

-the deregulation of the telecommunications sector producing media conglomeration and cable industry price gouging, and a current power-grab by the cable and telcos to allow them to destroy the internet;

-protection for rampant overpricing of pharmaceutical drugs;

-and the blocking of even the mildest attempt to prevent American corporations from dodging an estimated $50 billion in annual taxes by opening a PO Box in an off-shore tax haven like Bermuda or the Cayman Islands.

SOLUTION: Break candidates’ dependence on private money

-Clean Money/Clean Elections: a voluntary system of full public financing. Candidates qualify by demonstrating a real base of support in their district by raising a large number of small $5 contributions. Then they agree to raise no additional private money and abide by spending limits, in exchange for a full and equal grant of public funds. Additional funds are given to participating candidates if they are outspent by a non-participating candidate or independent expenditures. This is not pie-in-the-sky: it’s been the law in Maine and Arizona since 2000 and it’s spreading to many more states.

-The Good News from Maine:

-Since Clean Elections became law, freed from ties to moneyed interests, lawmakers have approved policies that favor voters rather than those of donors. Maine’s Dirigo Health Program, enacted in 2003 by a legislature heavily populated by “clean” lawmakers, is the closest any state has come to providing universal health care. State Representative Marilyn Canavan has said, “I doubt that this bill would ever have seen the light of day under business as usual politics dominated by special interest groups. Instead, we took on the health care industry and insurance companies and adopted a health care plan that serves the people.”

-What’s more, Maine’s Clean Elections system has proven extremely popular among candidates.

-More than three out of four legislators now serving in the house and senate used Clean Elections.

-This year, of 14 gubernatorial candidates, nine have declared their intention to use Clean Elections. Of the 80 state senate candidates, 71 (89%) have declared their intention to run “clean” and of the 311 candidates for the House of Representatives, 252 (81%) have declared their intent to use Clean Elections.

-The Good News from Arizona:

-Arizona’s Governor Janet Napolitano was elected running “clean” in 2002. One of her first acts in office was to order the bulk purchasing of prescriptions under Medicaid, a step that will save the elderly millions, and one that she has said she could not have done had she not run “clean.”

-Since the implementation of CE in 2000, a much more diverse group of candidates has run for office (48% more minorities, 33% more women between ’98 and ’04); voter turnout has increased substantially; far more people are participating in the funding of elections and the people giving $5 contributions come from neighborhoods that are more diverse ethnically and economically than those who give to privately funded candidates.

-Races are more competitive: The reelection rate for incumbents in Arizona dropped significantly in 2002 and 2004, according to an analysis by researchers at the University of Wisconsin. While this trend cannot entirely be explained by the existence of Clean Elections, it is not true that incumbent reelection rates are rising. The researchers also concluded that “there is no question that public funding programs have increased the pool of candidates willing and able to run for state legislative office. The effect is most pronounced for challengers, who were far more likely than incumbents to accept public funding….Public funding appears to have increased the likelihood that an incumbent will have a competitive race.”

-the cost is minimal—approximately $1.35 per Arizonan.

-More than 60% of candidates in Arizona’s 2006 elections are running clean.

THE MOVEMENT IS SPREADING.

-Connecticut recently adopting full public financing for all state races, in response to a huge series of political scandals involving the governor and several other top officials. New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Vermont have Clean Money systems for some races, and the municipalities of Portland, Oregon and Albuquerque, New Mexico recently approved full public financing for citywide races, the first via a vote in City Council, the second by citizen initiative. Most recently, the California Assembly approved a bill providing full pubic financing of elections. In all, advocates in 30 states are working to pass Clean Elections systems. Find out more from Public Campaign.

-Meanwhile, at the federal level, Rep. John Tierney (D-MA) and Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) are sponsors of a Clean Elections bill, H.R. 3099, which would bring a system similar to Maine and Arizona’s to congressional campaigns.

ACTION STEPS

Next door in CA, the Assembly passed a CM measure, and the California Nurses Association has taken major steps toward placing this issue before voters in November. Think about the Schwarzenegger $120 million campaign as the backdrop for passing reform.

TN passed public financing through one chamber earlier this year in the wake of scandals. Coalitions in diverse and interesting states like MD, HI, MT are all considering it – and candidates are paying attention. Eliot Spitzer, for one, has endorsed Clean Elections for New York elections – what a difference that would make.

Tom DeLay once called the Northern Marianas Islands a Petri dish of capitalism. As wrong as he is, the scandals he spawned in Congress, along with others, are the Petri dish of reform. The real challenge is to make that reform reflective of progressive and little d democratic values.

That’s why we’re kicking off a national campaign to raise the stakes and raise the bar on reform. Public Campaign and its related organization, Public Campaign Action Fund, work with progressive, political groups as well as traditional reform orgs like Common Cause. We’ve brought together a broad coalition of groups to push public financing for congressional races – something supported by the AFL-CIO, SEIU, MoveOn, NAACP, and the Sierra Club – we know because we signed them all on to the same letter to Senators.

This campaign, which will be launched in the coming weeks will have at its center a Clean Up Congress Pledge for federal office holders and candidates to sign – and we’ll be rolling this out in the media, with our activists, and yes, online.

The other critical place we’ll be launching this is on Clean Money Day – June 27 – at house parties in every state in the nation. Working with Brave New Films and about three dozen organizations, we’re participating in the national screenings of The Big Buy: Tom DeLay’s Stolen Congress, and we’ll be organizing activists out of these house parties to go forth and get federal politicians to sign our pledge. Please sign up to host or attend a house party – the Brave New Film folks are circulating here at the conference and Robert Greenwald will be doing a screening tomorrow.

I’m at the JetBlue terminal in JFK, waiting for my flight to Las Vegas to attend YearlyKos. I’m talking on the Friday morning panel on “Election Reform.” The panel’s at 8am, alongside three other strong panels…so I’m thinking that more people will probably learn what I have to say if I just post my notes on this blog as well as my DailyKos diary (though if you are one of the four people who reads this blog you know what I have to say already). I’m still writing those notes, however…so you’ll have to wait.

On the drive down to the airport, I was reflecting that I’ve been going to citizen conventions like these for years: the Nuclear Freeze annual meetings in the early 1980s…the “Media and Democracy” conferences that Don Hazen and crew used to put on in the late 1980s…the “Third Parties ’96″ gathering of independent progressives…the Reform Party’s crazy conventions…the Working Families Party’s annual conventions…and of course a smattering of national political conventions (Atlanta 1992 for the Ds…San Diego 1996 for the Rs…Los Angeles 2000 for the Ds…and both Boston and New York in 2004 for the Ds and Rs).

And all of those very different events were fun and revealing, each in their own way. I’m heading to YearlyKos curious about a couple of things: to what degree will this be like a de facto Democratic mid-term convention (which would be a good thing, though this is hardly representative)…to what degree will this be like a summer camp reunion of people who have never met face-to-face but “know” each other through the intensive collaborative space that is DailyKos…and to what degree will people use the uber-networking potential of being at a somewhat top-down political convention (far less top down than anything any of the politicos coming will have ever experienced I’m sure, but still top-down in the sense of having “A-list” blog celebrities and keynoters soaking up a lot of attention) that is ALSO fully wired to subvert the normal pattern of boring panel after boring panel and turn this into a sideways-up festival of grass-roots expression and energy.

It could get interesting…