Chuck Raasch: The future of newspapers

These are depressing days in news, and those still in the profession don’t talk nearly enough about how that affects Americans and their way of life.

Maybe it’s because we’re sensitive to being seen as defending dinosaurs, or too timid after endless ideological attacks on “the mainstream media.”

Newspapers in big cities like Denver and Seattle have folded. The Tucson Citizen’s future is uncertain.

Experienced journalists are being forced out of the business, often leaving to write speeches or press releases for politicians or corporations. State capital press corps have been decimated.

If not there already, we could soon be living in a world where government and politicians spend more on public relations and propaganda than an independent media spends to watch them.

Whether you’re a fan of the news media or not, this is anathema to honest self-government.

Imagine Richard Nixon with a 10 million-member e-mail army behind him, with legions of bloggers attacking his political foes, with a much larger phalanx of taxpayer-paid public relations people defending him, and with no independent investigative reporters raising questions others dare not ask.

If Nixon had survived the “third-rate burglary” at the Watergate, how long would his enemies list have grown, and how emboldened would he have become in spying on political rivals?

At a time when government is growing at an unprecedented pace, veteran Associated Press reporter Bob Lewis says it best: “There has never been a greater need for honest, truthful reporting than now. Sadly, there has never been less support for it than there is now. Invest in freedom. Buy a newspaper.”

In this season of scapegoating, Americans more than ever need watchdogs whose mission transcends self- interest. But it’s open season on the one industry that has tried to fill that role.

When comedian and cable political-show host Jon Stewart beat up on cable business-show host Jim Cramer, some cheered it as a righteous upbraiding of the news media for sleeping – or cheerleading – while Wall Street ran off with the nation’s piggybank.

There are fundamental problems with this claim.

First, as Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen pointed out, the dons of Wall Street were assuring shareholders and business journalists, including Cramer, of the genius behind the complicated financial “products” that later unraveled at investment houses and insurance giant AIG.

As Cohen noted, Wall Street big shots were putting their own money into their own businesses. No red flags there.

Former President George W. Bush assured Americans that the fundamentals of the economy were strong, even as crisis loomed.

Those with government regulatory subpoena and enforcement powers were slow to act or did not act at all. Members of Congress proclaimed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in good shape while the home-loan giants were apparently rotting from within.

Someone needs to be blamed, and what better target than the cartoonish Cramer? Ironically, cable news, where Cramer works, is the news medium that has weathered the financial crisis the best.

Why? Because people watch it, shouting and all. Perhaps because of the shouting.

But the picture is bleak for independent news gathering at a lower decibel. People are migrating to the Internet, where news and advertising have diverged, and where consumers have come to expect news for free.

Coupled with a crippling recession, these trends have cut advertising revenues by nearly a quarter in two years, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism. Massive layoffs have followed, while independent media race to invent a new business model.

“The problem facing American journalism is not fundamentally an audience problem or a credibility problem,” the Project for Excellence in Journalism said in its annual report. “It is a revenue problem – the decoupling . . . of advertising from news.”

Americans, the group concluded, “hunt and gather what they want when they want it, use search to comb among destinations and share what they find through a growing network of social media.”

The question is not whether platforms for public debate will be available.

Indeed, information overload is a bigger challenge to consumers today. In a world where niche news providers are growing at an explosive rate, consumers are forced to triage their choices. Under such conditions, it’s tempting to create a comfort zone of self-affirming opinion in which compromise and common ground are vilified as weakness.

The media universe may become warring information camps funded by rigidly ideological tribes or multimillionaires who see the public interest as an obstacle to personal success. If that happens, Americans will have a lot more to worry about than a few loudmouths in prime time.

Chuck Raasch is political editor for Gannett News Service. E-mail: craasch@gns.gannett.com

‘There has never been a greater need for honest, truthful reporting than now. Sadly, there has never been less support for it than there is now. Invest in freedom. Buy a newspaper.’

2008 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

CHUCK RAASCH

Is it all over but the shouting – literally? John McCain and the Republican Party confront that reality if you believe most polls approaching the last full week of the 2008 campaign.

The ads will keep coming, the phone calls and door-knocking will continue at furious paces and the talking heads will opine until they’re hoarse. But if the election were held today, some forecasters predict, Barack Obama would win by more than 100 electoral votes.

He could have a near filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and about a 50-seat cushion in the House of Representatives, the biggest for the Democrats since their 1994 meltdown. The newly emboldened Democrats would arrive on an avalanche of discontent.

There are real consequences for the country of such an outcome. The last time the Democrats were in this position, they overreached on health care reform, and Bill Clinton squandered his mandate.

He spent the rest of his eight years in office tacking to the center, paring his ambitions, cutting deals with Republicans and surrounded by a smaller Democratic representation in Congress.

If Obama wins and tacks too far left on taxes, spending and health care, he would risk repeating history. Many Americans are still to the right of Obama and Democratic leadership on many of these issues.

His running mate, Joe Biden, predicts an international crisis test of Obama in the first six months of his presidency. But if Obama is elected, his first real test will be confronting the myriad pent-up ambitions of Pennsylvania Avenue.

If Republicans get caught in a landslide, they can blame themselves. The GOP controlled the White House and at least one branch of Congress for the first six years of this decade. They let federal spending get out of hand.

George W. Bush acquiesced to the addition of a costly new entitlement program, the prescription plan for Medicare. Republican members of Congress lined up at the federal earmark trough. The war in Iraq was badly run, something McCain says constantly on the stump.

The capper may have come when longtime Republican Colin Powell, scolding his own party, endorsed Obama with 16 days to go. Powell lamented the tone of McCain’s campaign, where surrogates have suggested, as some Republicans did in 1992, that there is a good and bad America, and that only they represent the good.

Powell urged Republicans to “stop this kind of nonsense, pull ourselves together and remember that our great strength is our unity and diversity.”

The irony of Powell’s endorsement must be noted. Obama opposed the Iraq war from the beginning. Powell was its chief proponent in a dramatic prewar appearance at the United Nations – one, it turns out, predicated on faulty intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities.

Yet Obama says Powell could serve in his administration. What of Obama’s claim that the decision to go to war was a fundamental test of judgment?

A bad McCain loss would leave Republicans roughly where they were in 1992, a party seemingly out of ideas and optimism.

The silver lining: The party quickly recovered in 1994, with a newer, more optimistic, face under the leadership of then-Republican chairman and now Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi and Rep. Newt Gingrich of Georgia.

The GOP may have to regroup out of the South again. Some of their strongest governors are there, including Barbour, Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal and Florida’s Charlie Crist.

Days after the 2004 election, then-White House adviser Karl Rove talked with political reporters over breakfast about the consequences of a “broad victory” for George W. Bush.

“Republicans need to focus on delivering,” he said. “Because we have laid out an agenda, we have laid out a vision. People want to see results, whether it is on the war on terror or tax reform or education reform or Social Security modernization.”

The outlines of a stable Iraq are within sight. But Osama bin Laden still is at large, Afghanistan still is troubled and the domestic reforms that Rove talked about so boldly four years ago are buried under avalanches of debt and doubt.

This election has been defined by surprises. But in the end, there might have been nothing John McCain could have done to stop the avalanche.

Chuck Raasch is political editor for Gannett News Service.

E-mail: craasch@gns.gannett.com

Gannett News Service

CHUCK RAASCH

Gannett News Service

HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. – John McCain charged, Barack Obama parried, and “Joe the plumber” came up so many times they could have had a chair for him.

Both men did what they came to do, but the most spirited and final debate between the two presidential candidates likely left no fundamental shakeup of the 2008 presidential election. So the final 19 days of the campaign proceed with the Democratic nominee Obama having the edge, largely because of fundamental concerns about the economy under the Republican presidency of George W. Bush.

Obama repeatedly tried to tie McCain with unpopular President Bush, particularly on economic policy. In one of the 90-minute debate’s most memorable moments, McCain declared: “Sen. Obama, I am not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush you should have run four years ago.”

Facing each other across desks at Hofstra University, the Democrat Obama and the Republican McCain exposed sharp and familiar divisions on tax, energy, health care, abortion rights and trade policy. But for the first time in a debate, they detoured into some of the raw rhetoric that has infused both campaigns in recent days. McCain raised Obama’s relationship with ’60s-era radical William Ayers. Obama complained that people attending some of McCain’s rallies have cried “terrorist” or “kill him” when Obama’s name is mentioned.

McCain was best with repetitive calls to smaller government and lower taxes for everyone. Obama scored when he said Americans’ economic concerns trumped any personal differences he has with McCain.

Never far off stage, rhetorically, was Joe Wurzelbacher, a Holland, Ohio, plumber who had told Obama at an Ohio rally earlier this week that he was worried that Obama would raise his taxes and prevent him from buying his plumbing business. McCain’s campaign highlighted the confrontation leading into the debate, and the Arizona senator wasted little time invoking Joe the plumber.

McCain said Obama’s plan to raise taxes on Americans making over $250,000 would hit small-business owners like Wurzelbacher the hardest.

“In other words we are going to take Joe’s money, give it to Sen. Obama, and let him spread the wealth around,” McCain said. “I want Joe the plumber to spread the wealth around.”

“We both want to cut taxes,” Obama responded. “The difference is, who do we want to cut taxes for? . . . Nobody likes taxes. . . . but ultimately we have to pay for the investments that make this economy strong.”

Prodded by moderator Bob Schieffer to talk about leadership, McCain finally raised Ayers, whose Weather Underground bombed federal buildings, including the Pentagon. McCain had talked about the ’60s radical on the stump, but not at their first two debates.

“We need to know the full extent of that relationship,” McCain said.

Obama portrayed Ayers as a distraction from the real concerns of Americans, condemned his “despicable acts,” and listed several advisers – prominent Republicans and Democrats – he said had really helped shape his political views

“Mr. Ayers is not involved in my campaign, he has never been involved in this campaign, and he will not advise me in the White House,” Obama said.

Three presidential debates over 19 days were overshadowed by larger events far outside the debate halls. They produced no lasting sound bites, no major missteps, and no decisive verdicts for either man. Which is the way Obama might have scripted it. He needed to appear presidential, and polls showed he was able to do that in the first two debates.

McCain came to Hofstra with more at stake because he had fallen behind Obama in national polls and in emerging swing states like Virginia and Colorado, as a global economic crisis intensified.

Since their last meeting in Nashville eight days ago, the stock markets have fallen to levels of roughly four years ago, and the Dow retreated another 700-plus points on Wednesday. The federal government has partially nationalized some of the nation’s largest banks. Americans remain worried about the economy, but they still have a modicum of trust that a new leader could forge a path back to prosperity, according to a new survey released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.

Obama plays basketball to blow off steam, and an analogy from that sport is fitting now. Obama needs to run out the clock to Nov. 4 without any major mistakes or surprises – a major national security event, for instance – that would propel this campaign into yet another unexpected turn.

Gannett News Service
RAASCH COLUMN

ANALYSIS by CHUCK RAASCH

How much change can you realistically expect in the next president? And is big change desirable?

Answer to question No. 1: not a lot, for both situational and institutional reasons.

Whether it’s Barack Obama or John McCain, the new president won’t have the money to fund ambitious new ideas and will be dealing with a Congress devoid of bipartisan trust and reviled by a majority of Americans.

Answer to question No. 2: not always, and the founders wanted it that way. They guaranteed regular change opportunities with elections. But they also created divided government to guard against big and impetuous swings in policy.

In a focus group of 12 Missouri voters last week, pollster Peter Hart discovered widespread wariness on whether the next president could unite the nation.

“We have a lot of repairing to do,” said Obama supporter Kurt Wachter, 25, a barbecue cook and college student.

Dawn Pashia, 38, a McCain supporter, cited “fixing the economics” as a monumental challenge no matter which candidate wins.

Americans’ anger over a mortgage and credit industry bailout may have risen in direct proportion to their falling 401(k) balances or in their growing realization that government, business and private individuals all contributed to the problem.

But whether they liked what they saw in Congress or not, this was self-governance. People were complaining, warning, even listening. Many “no” votes on the first shot at a $700 billion bailout plan in the House were from politicians who had been inundated with angry constituent calls.

A dictator or king would have dispensed with that unpleasantness. And public opinion would have been ground down and buried in the seething of the powerless.

Brookings Institution scholars Pietro S. Nivola and Charles O. Jones just released a paper that cited many of the above points in predicting Americans should rein in their expectations for change after George W. Bush. They cite the obvious, including big government deficits and the difficult foreign policy challenges from Iran to North Korea to Venezuela.

Nivola and Jones also say Americans aren’t ready for the big changes needed to address problems like energy consumption. And a close election, as appears possible, would give neither Obama nor McCain a clear mandate.

Obama’s and McCain’s “promises to make over Washington, with ambitious new agendas, will most likely run afoul of old political realities,” they said.

Besides lack of money, Nivola and Jones cite these obstacles: “Well-organized naysayers, partisan polarization in Congress, obstructionism in the Senate, bureaucratic inertia, an enigmatic Supreme Court, independent-minded state governments, a public that naturally likes a free lunch, a mostly nondiscretionary budget and, of course, the rest of the world’s propensity to constrain America’s options.”

For the first time since 1961, Americans will inaugurate a senator as their new president. Neither Obama nor McCain has executive experience, and the learning curve will be steep, according to Jones.

“Executives can duck but can’t hide,” Jones said. “Legislators can do both.”

Jones and Nivola say the new president may conclude that some Bush policies weren’t so bad after all, including education and immigration reform, and could discover how limited the options are on dealing with Iran and other adversaries. Even in areas where both McCain and Obama disagree with Bush, change could be difficult.

“Either a McCain or an Obama presidency would facilitate some sort of climate-change legislation, a departure from Bush’s position,” Nivola and Jones wrote.

But the changes will be modest, they predicted, because “a Draconian, hence punishing, assault on greenhouse gases lacks popular consent, in this country and every other.”

In an interview, Nivola said Americans tend to deflate the importance of real change while dwelling on obvious failures.

He said there were major policy shifts on welfare reform and free-trade agreements under Bill Clinton in the 1990s, even though Clinton left Social Security potentially insolvent and fell short on universal health insurance.

Bush also won’t get the Social Security solution he wanted, but Nivola said education reform, tax cuts and AIDS relief were “very big deals.”

“Successes get less credit,” he said, “than the failures get the blame.”

E-mail Chuck Raasch, political editor for Gannett News Service, at craasch@gns.gannett.com. For his Furthermore blog, see this column at www.tucsoncitizen.com/opinion.

Gannett News Service
ANALYSIS

CHUCK RAASCH

GNS Political Writer

ST. LOUIS – On a most non-traditional debate stage, Sarah Palin and Joe Biden embraced traditional vice presidential political roles Thursday, with each attacking the opposing presidential nominee in a spirited but largely friendly debate.

Palin, the first Republican female running mate whose preparedness for the job was greatly questioned going in, for the most part held her own against the more veteran Biden.

The Delaware senator, known for his rhetorical volatility, was measured – if direct – in his criticism of Republican presidential nominee John McCain.

And so for the most part, the debaters favorably answered lingering questions about Palin and Biden – Palin by surviving on the same stage, Biden by not condescending to his less-experienced foe.

It was a stark historical tableau. On a stage long dominated by white men, a 44-year old woman and 65-year-old man were questioned by a black woman, PBS’s Gwen Ifill.

Biden and Palin smiled often but disagreed sharply on energy, taxes and foreign policy. Both employed folksiness to make broader points.

Palin began by describing parents at a weekend soccer game, worrying over the economy.

Biden referred to his middle-class neighborhood in Wilmington, Del. He nearly choked up when he referred to looking after a child whose survival was in question. He lost his first wife and daughter, and his two surviving sons were severely injured, in a car accident 36 years ago.

But the two combatants were anything but folksy when they exposed fundamental disagreements in policy and philosophy.

Palin, seeking to drive a wedge between Biden and Democratic nominee Barack Obama, criticized Obama for voting against an Iraq troop-funding bill in 2007, a vote that Biden criticized at the time.

“The surge and counterinsurgency plan … has worked,” Palin said, arguing that Biden and Obama were waving a “white flag of surrender” by advocating a withdrawal timetable.

Turning to Biden, she said, “I respected you when you called him out on that. You said that his vote was political, you said it would cost lives.”

But Biden argued that McCain had voted against troop funding on a procedural vote that had included a withdrawal timeline.

“Barack Obama and I agree fully on one thing,” Biden said. “You have got to have a timeline.”

For McCain, Biden said, “there is no end in sight.”

Biden defended Obama’s plan to cut middle-class taxes while raising them on people making more than $250,000.

“Where I come from that’s called fairness,” he said.

Palin said those increases would catch too many small businesses and hurt the economy, and she seized on a recent Biden claim that it was “patriotic” for the wealthy to pay higher taxes.

“In the middle class of America, which is where (husband) Todd and I have been all of our lives, that is not patriotic,” she said. “Patriotic is saying, government, you know, you’re not always the solution.”

They disagreed on drilling for oil in a sensitive wilderness area in Palin’s Alaska. Palin acknowledged she and McCain disagreed on that point, but she used it to portray herself as an independent thinker.

“What do you expect? Two mavericks are not going to agree on everything,” she said, adding that McCain “has never asked me to check my opinions at the door.”

The nationally televised debate at Washington University came amid shifting momentum – both in polls and on the issues – toward Obama and Biden. Over the past 10 days, the Democrats have gained in national and key battleground state polls, as Congress and President George W. Bush have struggled to bail out the ailing mortgage and credit industries.

McCain shook the status quo when he named Palin his running mate a month ago, and she dominated news coverage in early September.

But with economic concerns rising, and with Palin stumbling in some media appearances leading into the debate, her favorability with the public has declined. Her debate performance is likely to quell some of those concerns, and Ifill never led the two debaters to direct confrontation about whether Palin was qualified for the job.

Still, Palin has a large hill to climb.

A Pew Research Center for the People & the Press poll taken last weekend showed only 37 percent of respondents believed Palin was qualified to be president should she need to succeed McCain, who is 72 years old. That was down from 52 percent in early September.

Pew’s survey, taken Sept. 27-29, had Obama ahead of McCain nationally 49 percent to 42 percent. The two men had been virtually tied in a Pew poll taken two weeks earlier.

Contact GNS Political Writer Chuck Raasc at craasch@gns.gannett.com.

Gannett News Service
RAASCH COLUMN

The battles in Congress over a massive government bailout of the nation’s financial system have offered fresh insights into how Barack Obama and John McCain would work with what is likely to be a strengthened Democratic Congress in 2009.

In Friday night’s debate, but especially in the acrimonious negotiations in Congress in the days preceding, McCain essentially came across as a potential president with no permanent allies, even in his own party.

His decision to get involved with the negotiations over the proposed $700 billion economic bailout plan exposed conservatives’ unease with their party’s presidential candidate.

Obama, by contrast, embraced – and was embraced by – Democrats in Congress.

“Obama would be able to govern with a unified party behind him, while McCain would have a more difficult time keeping his party in hand,” said Jon Bond, a political scientist at Texas A&M, who has studied Congress and the presidency. “The conservatives in the party have never really trusted McCain.”

Paul Erickson, a Republican strategist who backed McCain rival Mitt Romney in the primaries, predicted that a McCain presidency “will launch a civil war within the Republican Party, the skirmish lines of which began to emerge during the primaries.

“The day after McCain’s inauguration, every party member will have to decide if they are a Republican or a conservative,” Erickson added. “Because McCain will, on an almost daily basis, adopt positions which will be identified as Republican based upon his affiliation, but which will bear scant resemblance to the tenets of Reaganism.”

McCain’s advisers and defenders argue that is precisely why McCain would be more effective than Obama in the hostile, partisan environment in Washington.

Democrats are likely to increase their majorities in the House and Senate in the November elections. But conservative Republicans, especially in the House of Representatives, proved in the debate over the bailout that they will demand attention from the next president.

Democrats accused McCain of jumping in the middle of deliberations and derailing a bailout agreement just when it appeared ready.

But McCain’s advisers said the Arizona senator recognized that Congress was more divided than its leaders realized and his presence at a White House meeting Thursday prompted disparate parties to move toward an agreement that would be more likely to get congressional approval and be more palatable to more Americans.

“What Sen. McCain is absolutely critical in doing is getting everyone together at the table,” McCain senior adviser Steve Schmidt said. He argued that McCain listened in the White House meeting while Obama launched a “five-minute soliloquy that soon erupted into chaos.

“Welcome to the Obama White House, I suppose,” Schmidt said.

But Obama senior adviser David Axlerod accused McCain of rapidly changing positions on the financial crisis, moving from saying that the fundamentals of the economy were strong and then, days later, suspending his campaign to jump into the deliberations over a bailout.

By contrast, Axlerod said, Obama “didn’t try to insert himself into the middle of that to turn it into a political spectacle.”

Chuck Raasch is political editor for Gannett News Service. E-mail: craasch@gns.gannett.com. For his Furthermore blog, see this column at www.tucsoncitizen.com/opinion.

RAASCH COLUMN

In a presidential campaign long framed by Barack Obama’s newness, Sarah Palin has suddenly captured the change spotlight.

Republicans have employed an effective, if well-worn, tactic of portraying the Alaska governor as an outsider while counterattacking her critics as sexists or as practitioners of media bias.

It has pushed Republican presidential nominee John McCain to a tie or slight lead over Obama in national polls, while giving Republicans a boost in their outlook for House and Senate races.

“I cannot overstate for you the immediate, explosive, shot in the arm, the B-12 shot this has had in the way it has raised money, moxie, momentum and message,” said Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway. “It is also a verification of conservative principles.”

But can Republicans sustain the Palin Push over the next eight weeks? Democrats think the Alaska governor will wilt under the pressure of the campaign and an important Oct. 2 vice presidential debate with Joe Biden in St. Louis.

Yet, as a measure of Democrats’ worries, presidential nominee Obama has led anti-Palin attacks. Normally, that would be Biden’s job, but the Delaware senator can’t shoehorn himself into the news as the country takes its first complete look at Palin as McCain’s running mate.

At the moment, Palin is a three-fer for McCain:

• As the second female running mate ever, she gives Republicans a claim on the history of 2008 that competes with Obama’s status as the first black nominee of a major party.

• Her ideology appeals to conservatives.

• Intense media scrutiny has fed a GOP narrative pitting a disconnected Washington culture against an outsider ticket, despite McCain’s long Washington service. Geographically and culturally, one can’t be more removed from Washington than Palin’s hometown of Wasilla, Alaska.

According to some polls, McCain-Palin has gained primarily among women.

“There is no way he is going to keep them,” said Jim Jordan, a Democratic strategist who ran 2004 nominee John Kerry’s political operation early in that campaign.

Democrats always have a favorable gender gap among women, and the Palin-led surge “just screams temporary,” Jordan said, arguing there are too many unknowns about her.

“There will be a bad story a day coming out of Palin’s world,” he said.

As an example, Jordan pointed to a Washington Post story Tuesday saying Palin had accepted state per diem expense payments on days she slept at home.

Palin’s defenders said it was an accepted practice for an Alaska governor, but critics said it undermined her anti-earmark, cut-government mantra.

In a television ad, Democrats accused Palin and McCain of “lying” about their “maverick” claims, focusing partly on her initial support for a controversial “bridge to nowhere” from Ketchikan to a sparsely populated island in Alaska.

Palin supported the $400 million federal earmark during her campaign for governor in 2006, but opposed it after it became controversial and was essentially killed by Congress. Alaska spent the money on other projects.

Despite the Democratic attacks, McCain and Palin have driven campaign discussion since the close of the GOP convention in St. Paul last week.

A study released Tuesday by the Project for Excellence in Journalism concluded that Palin was prominent in 60 percent of campaign-related news stories in major newspapers and networks over the previous week. Biden led in 2 percent.

Internal GOP polls show more loyalty among Republicans for McCain-Palin than Democrats for Obama-Biden.

McCain also has closed the Democrats’ enthusiasm gap with higher percentages of his likely supporters saying they are excited about the election than said so before the convention.

Chuck Raasch is the political editor for Gannett News Service. E-mail: craasch@gns.gannett.com. For Raasch’s Furthermore blog, see this article at www.tucsoncitizen.com.

PALIN AND THE POLLS

Pew Research Center survey conducted Sept. 5-8 of 1,004 adults nationwide. Margin of error: plus-minus 3.5 percentage points.

Based on what you know about Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, do you think she is qualified to serve as president if necessary?

Qualified Not qualified

52% 39%

Based on what you know about Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden, do you think he is qualified to serve as president if necessary?

Qualified Not qualified

66% 22%

Gannett News Service
RAASCH COLUMN

CHUCK RAASCH

Two days before celebrating his 20th anniversary on national talk radio, Rush Limbaugh got into an on-air argument with a woman from Colorado who accused him of causing her high blood pressure.

“I’m constantly enraged,” the woman, who identified herself as Jennifer, told America’s most famous conservative radio voice, “because every day it seems that you find a way, by innuendo or any other means, to put women down.”

“It’s not by innuendo, I do it directly,” Limbaugh replied. “I put down liberals. If they happen to be women, I put ‘em down.”

That’s Limbaugh in a sound bite. Twenty years into what is still the most listened-to political talk show, Limbaugh still enrages, entertains and – here comes the e-mail – enlightens.

Twenty years ago this month, now-retired ABC executive Edward McLaughlin pulled the Missouri native out of local-market obscurity in Sacramento, Calif. It was pre-Newt, pre-Bill and Hill, long before Gore, Perot, Monica and Bush II. In this post-9/11 age, 1988 seems eons ago.

Along the way, Limbaugh made a strategic decision to ride his own roller coaster. Unlike most in his genre, he generally doesn’t invite politicians on his show to spew talking points, although there are exceptions, like when President George W. Bush, former President George H.W. Bush and ex-Florida Gov. Jeb Bush surprised listeners with a live, on-air call on Aug. 1, the show’s actual anniversary date.

Regular listeners draw the distinction between Limbaugh the conservative and Limbaugh the Republican, which has granted him license to criticize presumptive GOP nominee John McCain, sometimes harshly. When Limbaugh mocks McCain, he does it in the voice of Popeye.

Limbaugh’s bombast – the “talent on loan from God” claim – is just outrageous enough to let regular listeners discern between shtick and serious commentary. He often appears to outrage for the sake of it, like his tendency to call Barack Obama “Barry,” the Democratic presidential contender’s childhood nickname; or “The Messiah,” to mock what Limbaugh says is “drive-by” media’s adulatory coverage.

There have been stumbles along the way, including a problem with prescription painkillers, which have given liberal critics ample punch lines.

But if successful politics is all about consistency and repetition, no one has been better over the past 20 years. If radio is entertainment, no one has surpassed Limbaugh on that front, either. As “Jennifer” illustrated, Limbaugh attracts those who hate him as much as the “dittoheads” who support him. Left, right or center, audience share is the bottom line.

Limbaugh claims 20 million regular listeners, although Talkers magazine Publisher Michael Harrison puts it closer to 14 million. But on a broader point, there is little dispute.

“Rush Limbaugh has been the leading political talk show host in America, and talk radio has been one of the leading forces in American politics,” said Harrison, whose magazine covers the industry. “Limbaugh is to talk radio what Elvis Presley was to rock and roll. (Presley) was its biggest star, but he was not its only star.”

Over 20 years, Limbaugh has certainly fired enough salvos across the ideological divide. But McLaughlin said he hired Limbaugh because he was an entertainer first, conservative second.

“I didn’t hire Rush Limbaugh or put him on the air in New York to be a conservative talk show host,” McLaughlin said. “I brought him to be a talk show personality. The fact that he was more conservative than liberal was not of interest to me, other than the fact that I saw an opening there. . . . I realized if I was all liberal, all day, I was not reaching the vast, total audience.”

Harrison said “Limbaugh is just off-the-charts talented. And after that, there was a need for a real conservative. And so conservatives rallied around him, and liberals rallied to hate him.”

Why has he survived, with no end in sight?

“He is no longer just the populist mouthpiece. He is not someone who takes talking points from the White House or Newt Gingrich,” said John Baick, a history professor at Western New England College in Springfield, Mass. “He is the center of gravity – or at least close to it – of conservatives, but not the Republican Party.”

McLaughlin, asked about how he separates Limbaugh’s shtick from conviction, remembered an early meeting with Limbaugh and Limbaugh’s brother, David, a conservative lawyer, author and commentator.

“Does he believe he has talent on loan from God? No. That was part of the shtick that he did,” McLaughlin said. “The part that he takes very seriously are his convictions about politics, or about government, or about society.

“I did have people who were sort of pseudo conservatives, who last week would have been liberals, who would have done anything that you wanted them to do on the air. I was convinced, when I met (Limbaugh) and his brother, that they were the real deal.”

E-mail: craasch@gns.gannett.com. For his Furthermore blog, see this column at tucsoncitizen.com/opinion.

BIOGRAPHY

Born: Jan. 12, 1951

Birthplace: Cape Girardeau, Mo.

Significant recent events

July 2001: Signs contract extension, reportedly worth $285 million, to keep him on the air through 2009.

2001: Announces he is almost completely deaf and first experienced hearing loss just four months earlier.

October 2003: Admits on the air that he is addicted to painkillers. Spends five weeks in a drug rehabilitation center.

November 2003: Returns to the air.

2006: Arrested on a charge of prescription fraud. Pleads not guilty, and agrees to pay Florida $30,000 and to undergo 18 months of substance-abuse treatment.

Books: Author of “The Way Things Ought To Be” (1992) and “See, I Told You So” (1993).

Personal: Three marriages, all ending in divorce. Has no children. Third marriage took place at the home of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who officiated.

Source:infoplease.com

HOW TO LISTEN

In Tucson, the Rush Limbaugh Show is broadcast Monday-Friday from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. to KNST, 790AM. Contact the show at 800-282-2882.

TOP TALKERS

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Rush Limbaugh

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Michael Savage (left)

Dr. Laura Schlesinger

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5.25 million Laura Ingraham

Mark Levin

RAASCH COLUMN

Here’s an analysis of some of the top flip-flop allegations leveled at each of the presidential candidates.

Arizona Sen. John McCain

IMMIGRATION

In 2006, McCain joined Democratic icon Sen. Edward Kennedy in sponsoring an immigration reform bill called “comprehensive” because it addressed all aspects of the issue.

Its most controversial proposal would have provided a path to citizenship for nearly all illegal immigrants. In slightly different form, and with different sponsors, the proposal failed in 2007, amidst a firestorm of public protest.

As McCain’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination faltered last summer, in large part because of his stand on immigration, he pulled back on his advocacy.

Declaring that he “got the message” of public concern about ongoing flows of illegal immigration, McCain vowed he would “secure the border first.” In addresses to Latino organizations, he has declared a firm commitment to the comprehensive approach. Still, he adds that such a bill can pass only after border security is assured.

Conclusion: Zigzag but not a flip-flop.

TAXES

McCain famously opposed President Bush’s tax cuts in 2001, saying they would benefit wealthy taxpayers and could lead to too much red ink in a time of war. Many Republicans were angry at him for opposing President Bush.

But McCain now advocates making the cuts permanent, arguing that the last thing the economy needs is higher taxes in an economic downturn. His critics call it a 180-degree switch.

Economic conditions are worse today, and Obama himself has a plan he says would lower taxes for low- and middle-income Americans.

But critics might say that if tax cuts were ill advised in 2001, before the United States spent hundreds of billions on the Iraq War, they also should be a bad move today.

Conclusion: Flip-flop.

ETHANOL

McCain has been a longtime opponent of subsidies for the grain-based fuel and in the 2000 presidential campaign doubted its efficacy as a fuel source. He used ethanol to symbolically prove his anti-pandering, maverick bona fides.

But in this campaign, he has been more favorable to ethanol, although he still opposes subsidies.

He can be partially excused because when he ran in 2000, the cost of oil was far less than it is today. McCain also has evolved on global warming, saying it’s better to err on the side of caution and pursue noncarbon-based fuels.

Conclusion: No flip-flop but a dollop of pandering.

Illinois Sen. Barack Obama

CAMPAIGN FINANCE

Obama long favored public financing of presidential campaigns and often portrayed his stand on public financing as one of principle aimed at keeping special interests at bay.

But after raising more than $200 million online with the most prolific small-donor support network in American political history, he reversed course and decided to privately finance his campaign, rejecting the $84 million in public financing McCain is preparing to take. McCain and campaign oversight groups were highly critical.

Obama said he was forced to forgo public financing because he was up against too many deep pockets from McCain, the Republican National Committee and GOP-related groups. He also said his small-donor base itself was an antidote to big-money interests that often dominate campaigns.

But in reality, Obama and Democrats have more than kept pace with McCain and the Republicans so far, and this decision could allow Obama to outspend McCain in the fall. This was a strategic political decision.

Conclusion: Flip-flop.

IRAQ

Obama’s critics hopped on a recent claim that he would “refine” his position on the war in Iraq after an upcoming trip there, his first in nearly three years, as a flip-flop.

But in reality, Obama has been consistently in favor of a pullout of American troops throughout the campaign. He advocates a two-brigade-a-month pullout rate, which he says would get the U.S. out of Iraq sometime in mid-2011. His position on getting out has been consistent.

If Obama has been mistaken or waffled on anything related to the war, it was his predictions about what would happen with the “surge” of troops sent to Iraq last year and his reluctance to acknowledge that it has led to a greater degree of stability.

In 2007, Obama predicted the surge would lead to a further “quagmire.” But this month, his campaign quietly pulled down the surge criticism from Obama’s Web site. Critics say he’s been too rigid in sticking to a pullout plan that could undermine U.S. efforts to withdraw under a stable Iraqi regime.

Conclusion: No flip-flop but latent recognition of new reality.

ELECTRONIC

SURVEILLANCE

Obama had earlier vowed to filibuster any legislation that gave retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that cooperated with the government in potentially illegal wiretapping.

The Bush administration says the legislation is important in the country’s ability to intercept terrorists’ communications.

But Obama recently voted for the FISA bill, causing a huge Internet backlash on his Web site and elsewhere, much of it from supporters who saw him as selling out to telecommunications companies.

Obama said it was not an “easy call,” that the new bill did worry him about potential abuse of executive privilege. And he vowed to retroactively try to strike problem passages.

But he says the bill is an improvement over the one he opposed last year. Critics say he simply didn’t want to look weak on terrorism in the middle of an election.

But some critics of previous bills agreed with Obama that the new version had civil liberties safeguards the old one didn’t.

Conclusion: Partial flip-flop.

Chuck Raasch is political editor for Gannett News Service.

E-mail: craasch@gns.gannett.com

Raasch’s blog: Get more behind-the-scenes reports, context and analysis about politicians and the political process in Raasch’s Furthermore blog.

Look for it at http://gns.gannett online.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section? Category=BLOGS03.

CHUCK RAASCH

I t’s flip-flop time, and we’re not talking about summer footwear.

It’s gotten to the point that Arnold Schwarzenegger says flip-flopping is getting a bad rap. The Terminator-turned-California governor recently told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that “you can change your mind” in politics and still be a good leader.

But judging by the rhetoric so far in the 2008 campaign, both Barack Obama and John McCain are employing tactics used in 2004.

Four years ago, Republicans painted Democrat John Kerry as a flip-flopper after he clumsily said he had voted for $87 billion to fund troops in Iraq and Afghanistan before he voted against it. Republican operatives showed up at Kerry rallies holding flip-flops.

Two-thirds of the voters told pollsters Kerry was a flip-flopper.

This month, flip-flopping charges have flown back-and-forth between the Obama and McCain camps so much that a cartoonist recently depicted the two likely presidential foes meeting each other in a shower wearing flip-flops.

A June CNN poll, conducted by Opinion Research, found that 61 percent thought McCain had changed his positions based on political reasons while 59 percent thought Obama had.

Some of the allegations have more merit than others. Some are simply politicians reacting to changing conditions, either in the economy, political reality or a combination of both.

Gannett News Service
RAASCH COLUMN

Most Americans probably never have cracked the cover of The New Yorker, but the liberal magazine’s front this week stoked the blast furnaces on the Internet, talk radio and opinion cable.

The cover crudely caricatures Barack and Michelle Obama as flag-burning, Osama bin Laden-honoring terrorists bumping fists in the Oval Office. It offended many, including John McCain.

But as crude and offensive as it was, the cover was tame next to other Internet rot, not all of it aimed at Obama. The ageism directed at John McCain is prevalent, too.

No doubt political discourse will move on to the next outrage. But the New Yorker image’s unintended consequence freshly exposed the cult of victimization so pervasive in American politics on at least three levels:

• Obama’s defenders railed against it as racist and offensive, and the image of Obama in Muslim clothing only reinforced the ill-gotten views of 12 percent of Americans who erroneously think Obama is a Muslim.

Further, this grievance goes, no one except the sophisticated New Yorker reader is smart enough to get it, so it’s bound to end up as a poster on every bigot’s wall.

• Conservatives complained that legitimate questions about Obama were stereotyped into a box of bigotry, and that they probably would get blamed for the image in the end.

• The New Yorker editors were shocked that the people who really should have understood this the most were among the biggest critics.

The irony is that Obama’s presidential hopes are built on getting beyond this kind of victimhood. As he told the NAACP on Monday in Cincinnati: “We got to demand more responsibility from Washington. . . . We got to demand more responsibility from Wall Street. But you know what? We have to demand more from ourselves.”

The New Yorker’s editor says the cover illustration, which included a burning flag in the fireplace and a picture of bin Laden on the Oval Office wall, was designed to satirize smears on Obama’s religion, patriotism, middle name and other negative identity politics directed at him.

This was essentially an attempt at inoculation that backfired.

Instead of persuading real bigots that they were wrong, the image stereotyped anyone with questions about Obama’s attitudes toward this country. Some Americans pay attention to such things as Old Glory lapel pins on their presidents.

The New Yorker cover was yet another case in which some of the sharpest cuts on Obama’s identity in this election have come from the left.

Bill Clinton used Obama’s race to attempt to diminish his South Carolina win. A Catholic priest friend of Obama had to apologize for mocking the fear of some whites of a black man in the Oval Office.

Last week, Jesse Jackson accused Obama of talking down to blacks and said he’d like to commit an act that made every man who heard it cross his legs.

The left has warned about a coming right-wing assault on Obama’s race and religion, but it’s done a fine job preparing the ground itself.

“It’s unreal to me that nearly all the BS coming against Obama during this campaign season has come from so-called friendly sources,” a writer known as Rikyrah wrote on Jack & Jill Politics, a site that describes itself as “a black bourgeoisie perspective on U.S. politics.”

Obama always describes himself as the son of a Kansan mother and Kenyan father, and he talks about a mosaic of new possibilities. The inference is that if he can merge such disparate origins toward such lofty aspirations as he has, the country he seeks to lead can, too. It is the opposite of victimization, a call for a politics of collaborative identity.

But Obama carries self-inflicted wounds. As written here previously, his comments about “bitter” Americans who “cling” to religion and guns hurt him more than the average New Yorker reader can understand, a stereotype of Middle America equally as offensive as the New Yorker cover.

One reason why Ronald Reagan attracted Democrats was because he was unabashedly in love with this country, often to the derision of the liberal intelligentsia. Reagan Democrats and swing voters are proud, patriotic and piqued about politicians who talk down to them.

Unfortunately for Obama, his comment enhanced the Internet-fueled whispers about him eschewing American flag pins or the rank falsehoods that have him sworn into office on the Quran. These are the kinds of things The New Yorker, which supports Obama, were trying to satirize.

Obama talks about his love and respect for basic American beliefs, like working hard and loving one’s country, in one of his TV ads. As the New Yorker flap illustrated, authenticating that claim is one of his biggest challenges.

Chuck Raasch is political editor for Gannett News Service.

E-mail: craasch@gns.gannett.com

For Raasch’s Furthermore blog, see this column at www.tucson citizen.com/opinion.

CARTOON THE TALK OF THE TOWN

• Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times: For all their practiced outrage, neither political camp really objects to this sort of controversy. Every news cycle dominated by what are essentially ephemera – like The New Yorker cover – is another 24 hours in which Obama and McCain have been spared questions about real issues. Insults are so much easier to deal with than issues.

• David Horsey, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: It’s like (Americans) need a flashing light saying, “It’s a joke,” or they lose the capacity to judge.

• Philip Kennicott, The Washington Post: The cover, like so many self-deprecating, wryly funny, overly self- referential New Yorker covers before it, is just another prism through which New Yorker readers confirm something that is true and easily caricatured at the same time: They are an elite, a minority, and while they might be more educated or sophisticated or adept at the play of humor, they will always be outvoted by Texas. And Kansas. And the rest of the states beyond reach of the A train.

• Elizabeth Moore, Newsday: The irony is that Obama has spent the past couple of weeks contending with a rising tide of complaint among his left-liberal base that he has abandoned them in a shift to the political center. . . . Indeed, the magazine profiles Obama’s formative years in Chicago, concluding that far from being the anti-establishment revolutionary satirized on its cover, Obama has succeeded by mastering the conventional, hardball political game.

Chuck Raasch

The last Texan to put so much of his money into a campaign was Ross Perot, who entertained the political world in 1992 with charts and rants of impending doom.

CHUCK RAASCH

But his message about the budget deficit was serious, and he helped push the United States government into the black for a fleeting stretch of the late 1990s.

Now comes T. Boone Pickens, an 80-year-old Texas oilman who is pushing – of all things – the power of wind. Pickens promises to be nearly as recognizable as the presidential candidates on TV this fall, which may be a tall order given Barack Obama’s fundraising prowess.

Like Perot, Pickens brings a serious message worth listening to.

The oilman-entrepreneur-takeover artist has sponsored nationwide ads with a clearer, more declarative energy proposal than either Democrat Obama or Republican rival John McCain has offered.

Obama would sink $150 billion into alternative energy research and raise car fuel standards. McCain would offer a $300 million bounty for the developer of a better electric car battery and favors more oil exploration.

But each campaign has spent so much time attacking the other’s plan that it has muddied the energy debate and left a wide opening for Pickens’ straightforward, unifying message.

“It’s our crisis,” Pickens says in his new ads, “and we can solve it.”

Do not underestimate the power of can-do in this political moment. Most Americans are made aware of the problems facing the country every time they fill a gas tank, pay a light bill or worry about health insurance.

Stipulate that no one in the government, Democrat or Republican, deserves an energy policy star over the past 35 years. Stipulate that expensive choices lie ahead. But quit pointing fingers and tell us how this can be fixed.

Pickens, a self-described oilman through and through, is an unlikely messenger for the moment. He’s gone from boom-to-bust-and-back, the Oil Patch’s equivalent of Al Gore.

So Pickens embracing wind is tantamount to Nixon going to China. He says the country can’t “drill its way out of this problem,” that his plan is doable “with the right kind of leadership” and with “everyone pulling together.”

Besides proposing a big wind-turbine construction plan, he wants Congress to either extend construction tax credits set to expire at year’s end or establish other incentives for new wind generation.

Oilmen may be the most despised romantics in the American West. But as big dreamers, they have rarely sold short on the possibility of America.

Pickens is putting his money behind his idea, funneling big bucks to a TV ad campaign and building a $10 billion wind farm, near Pampa, Texas.

His plan, available on www.pickensplan.com, is a relatively simple but big step. Over the coming decade, he wants to build enough turbines in the nation’s “wind belt” from Texas to North Dakota to provide more than 20 percent of U.S. electricity needs.

Pickens says that would free up enough natural gas to reduce foreign oil imports by 38 percent, ostensibly accelerating the trend to cars powered by something other than oil.

Such a plan would cost $1.2 trillion, he estimates, but it would allow the United States to keep at least one-third of the $700 billion it annually sends abroad for oil.

He says the potential is there. This is one of the windiest countries on the planet, and that’s no commentary on our perpetual campaigns. As the cliché goes, the U.S. is the Saudi Arabia of wind.

Pickens’ Web site is Perotesque in its use of charts and chalk and Texas talk. On his explainer video, you half expect Pickens to mention crazy aunts or vow to get under the hood, as the bantam billionaire Perot often did in the ’92 and ’96 elections.

Wind already is catching on in Flyover Country, where gigantic trucks can be seen hauling massive components of the 1-3 megawatt turbines headed for hillsides and bluffs in the wind belt from Washington state to Texas.

About 50,000 Americans are now employed in the wind generation industry, but Pickens’ plan could boost that figure to 500,000, according to the American Wind Energy Association.

Reaching 20 percent of the nation’s electrical needs through wind also would reduce carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation by 25 percent by 2030, something that could put power behind the 50 percent greenhouse gas reductions agreement at the just-concluded G-8 meetings in Japan.

Last year, I heard Pickens tell a class of high school graduates that he would trade all the money he ever made, all the fancy things he ever enjoyed, for their futures. He urged the 18-year-olds to learn from their failures as much as their successes.

This capacity to correct is an unheralded power of America. The nation’s energy thirst will have to be quenched by something other than oil, and soon.

If it takes an oilman to push the politicians out into the wind, so be it.

Chuck Raasch is political editor for Gannett News Service. E-mail: craasch@gns.gannett.com. For his Furthermore blog, see this column at tucsoncitizen.com/opinion.

Chuck Raasch

ANALYSIS BY CHUCK RAASCH

With it now certain to be John McCain versus Barack Obama in November, the differences will be stark and historic. The election will pit one of the oldest presidential nominees against the first black nominee of any major party.

They have big policy disagreements, but the differences between McCain and Obama may be as much in experience and leadership as ideology and substance.

And, fair or not, each has a guilt-by-association problem, as demonstrated by recent events.

As a Republican, McCain’s ties to an unpopular President Bush came into focus again with the publication of former Bush press secretary Scott McClellan’s scathing memoirs asserting Bush’s White House had engaged in “propaganda” to sell an unnecessary Iraq War.

Obama’s membership in his controversial Chicago church again came into focus with new Internet clips of a Catholic priest, a longtime Obama acquaintance, recently making racially insensitive statements about Sen. Hillary Clinton, and whites in general, in that church.

Previously, Obama had distanced himself from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s race-based statements.

McCain is too contrarian to be pigeonholed as a movement conservative. He’s tacked center-left on issues such as global warming and immigration. This may blunt Democrats’ attempts to tie him to Bush.

Obama’s federal legislative record is too sparse for an ideological stamp, although the National Journal labeled him the Senate’s most liberal member.

Republicans are likely to remind voters of that distinction often over the next five months – and the fact that, five years ago, Obama was a member of the Illinois Legislature.

But compared with Hillary Clinton, Obama may have more of an opportunity to define himself rather than have to answer for specific votes or policy positions he’s taken over a long political career.

“It is not starkly right versus left,” presidential scholar Charles Jones said of a McCain-Obama matchup. “It is center right versus pretty liberal.”

Obama, the senator from Illinois, has been campaigning in quasi-general election mode for weeks now. Clear dividing lines have emerged between him and Arizona Sen. McCain:

Will the generation gap supplant the gender gap in 2008? No major party candidates of the modern age would be as separated in age as Obama, who will be 47 on Election Day, and McCain, who will be 72.

Numerically, it sets up a classic debate about whether McCain is too old or Obama too green for the pressures of the presidency.

McCain will not be the oldest first-time presidential nominee. Republican Bob Dole was 73 in 1996 when he challenged Bill Clinton, 50. But the 25-year age gap between McCain and Obama would dwarf the 17-year gap Ronald Reagan had over Walter Mondale in 1984, when Reagan cruised to re-election after quipping he’d not make an issue of his opponent’s youth and inexperience.

McCain has framed the debate by arguing that Obama, only in his fourth year in the U.S. Senate, is naive and “reckless” in proposing unconditional sit-downs with leaders of Iran, Cuba and other hostile regimes.

But Jones said McCain’s argument would be stronger if McCain had some executive experience of his own.

“With Obama, the starker difference is obviously in electoral and government experience,” Jones said. “But even there, we have a senator versus senator, as far as experience is concerned, or a long legislative versus a short legislative experience.

“There is not even a hint of executive experience” in either candidate, Jones said.

Obama’s youth is a vigorous part of his stump appeal. And McCain’s age is showing up as a drag in polls.

A mid-May Quinnipiac University survey found that 43 percent of Florida voters, and 39 percent in each Ohio and Pennsylvania, would be very or somewhat uncomfortable with a 72-year-old president. In the poll, McCain was ahead of Obama in Ohio and Florida but trailed him in Pennsylvania.

“Even while this is good news for Sen. McCain . . . he has two very large problems – George Bush and his birthday,” said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac Poll. “Age is obviously a concern to voters, and his ties to Bush are clearly a problem.”

Chuck Raasch is political editor for Gannett News Service. E-mail: craasch@gns.gannett.com

RAASCH COLUMN

CHUCK RAASCH

Sixteen years ago, then-President George H. W. Bush resisted going on cable television talk shows because he thought they were beneath the presidency.

Ross Perot was trying to lasso the hot new medium, talk radio. And Bill Clinton crossed the cultural divide by playing saxophone on TV.

Fast forward to 2008, where candidates “friend” voters on My Space and raise tens of millions of dollars to the crescendo of hundreds of thousands of Internet mice.

Candidates regularly appear on “Oprah” and “The View,” have both uplifting and embarrassing moments sent instantaneously around the world on “viral videos,” wait for the latest offerings of “Obama Girl” or any other kind of unfiltered commentary online, and stream live campaign events on their Web sites.

Americans are getting more and more of their political information from each other, and from multiple sources.

Younger voters are reading traditional sources less but tuning in to politics more, and in ways their parents could not have conceived when their children were born.

The biggest divide in the 2008 election may not be over race or gender, but in technology.

A study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project determined that while traditional mediums like TV, newspapers and radio are still the primary source of political information for a majority of Americans, more avenues than ever are opening up.

The fastest-growing frontier of 2008 has been social networking sites such as Facebook and My Space.

Americans under 30 are far more likely to see such sites as legitimate sources of information. Blogs, Internet magazines, and even the use of text messaging are booming new political mediums.

It’s a roiling universe compared with 1980, when cable was the dominant and supposedly transformative medium of the new millennium, and when Ronald Reagan mastered the photo op to deliver a message of the day.

No one controls the message today, and in a far more vertical media world, the media hierarchy is melting, the points of entry are seemingly endless, and the gatekeepers are extinct.

“The information ecology has changed totally,” said Lee Rainie, founding director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

“The broadcast era was built around information being relatively scarce, relatively expensive to acquire, and therefore you needed big institutions to gather it for you and pass it out to you. In the past 15 years we have seen a reversal of all those things,” Rainie said. “Information is abundant, information is cheap to acquire and it is completely personal.”

He said that “there are many more people who have a capacity to be in that conversation, thanks to the Internet, because they can acquire the information, because they can produce it, because they can blog it, they can comment on it, they can tag it.”

Even before the 2008 campaign season heated up, Pew found that more than a fourth of Americans under 30 were getting campaign information from social networking sites, and that 8 percent – about 1 out of every 12 of these younger Americans – had signed up as a “friend” of a presidential candidate.

Those numbers undoubtedly have gone up over the past three months, as polls show interest in the 2008 campaign is outpacing that of any recent election.

Researchers still are uncertain of the cause and effect – how much the ease of communication is leading to the higher interest. It’s likely a combination of new avenues of communication as well as the unique issues and personalities of the 2008 campaign.

Either way, campaigns are playing the trends to the hilt by offering video feeds, blast e-mails, opportunities for instantaneous feedback and other techno-outreach strategies that they sometimes guard like state secrets.

For instance, none of the remaining presidential campaigns talks publicly about the percentage of the money they raise online.

But those who monitor campaign finance say one of the biggest reasons both Sens. Barack Obama of Illinois and Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York have broken all fund-raising records is the ease at which the two Democrats have raised money from small donors on the Internet.

Obama alone raised $40 million in March – numbers that astonished veteran campaign observers – from more than 442,000 donors, 218,000 of which were first-timers.

Going into March, Obama had already raised $193.6 million – triple the amount taken in by presumptive Republican nominee John McCain.

Clinton had raised about $169 million by the end of February, according to the Federal Election Commission, and her campaign said she took in about $20 million in March.

One of the latest communications trends is a variation of the “rapid response” concept honed by Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign. Campaigns have increasingly begun posting responses to opponents’ paid advertisements online within hours, if not sooner.

McCain did that twice when Clinton launched TV ads in Pennsylvania criticizing the Arizona senator for being AWOL on the nation’s economic challenges.

McCain immediately fired back in videos sent to supporters, journalists and launched onto viral highways such as You Tube that characterized the Democrats as proposing to tax the country out of its economic woes.

Chuck Raasch is political editor for Gannett News Service.

E-mail: craasch@gns.gannett.com. For Raasch’s Furthermore blog, see this story at www.tucsoncitizen.com.

Gannett News Service
RAASCH COLUMN

CHUCK RAASCH

The fight for the Democratic presidential nomination is likely to go the distance through the June 3 primaries because neither candidate has been able to poach on the other’s demographic base.

In what political scientist G. Terry Madonna describes as a “hardening of the demographic arteries,” Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have lurched from contest to contest within a tight margin of error since Obama won Iowa and Clinton rebounded by capturing New Hampshire.

With Tuesday’s primaries in Indiana and North Carolina standing as the next big contests, these demographic markers point to a relatively decisive win for Obama in North Carolina and a tossup to a slight Clinton advantage in Indiana.

Clinton, the senator from New York, has marshaled a traditional Democratic coalition of older white women and blue-collar workers to win in key Rust Belt primaries of Ohio and Pennsylvania over the past seven weeks.

Since the South Carolina primary in late January, Illinois Sen. Obama has won an overwhelming percentage of black voters, upper-income liberals and first-time voters.

The numbers are almost identical from state to state. Clinton won 66 percent of white women in Pennsylvania, 67 percent in Ohio on March 3.

She won 54 percent of people earning less than $50,000 in Pennsylvania, 56 percent in Ohio. She benefited heavily because women made up nearly 6 in 10 Democratic primary voters in both states.

Obama won 89 percent of black voters in Pennsylvania, 87 percent in Ohio. He won 61 percent of voters under the age of 29 in both states.

“You go from campaign to campaign and nobody is winning in the other person’s home demographic,” said Madonna, a political scientist at Franklin & Marshall College. “You would think that something would give, but it hasn’t.”

Here’s why demographics, rather than polls, may be a more accurate marker for the next two primaries.

Indiana is demographically close to Pennsylvania, which Clinton won by 9 percentage points.

North Carolina is more of a first cousin to South Carolina than a close sibling, and some experts on Southern politics say the Tar Heel state more and more resembles Virginia in its politics and population. Obama decisively won both the South Carolina and Virginia primaries.

North Carolina’s population is 21.4 percent black; South Carolina’s is 29.4 percent. South Carolina’s population is slightly older and more blue collar, but North Carolina has a higher percentage of college graduates and those making more than $50,000 a year.

Older and blue-collar voters have favored Clinton, while more educated and wealthier voters have gone for Obama.

Indiana is similar to Pennsylvania, “in terms of how the states split up with rural voters, aging voters, manufacturing,” said Ed Feigenbaum, publisher of Indiana Legislative Insight, a political newsletter.

Some think the historic elements of the primary campaign have helped harden the demographic camps. Clinton is the first serious female contender for a party nomination, and Obama is the first black candidate to achieve front-runner status so late in a nomination fight.

“Both of these are history-making campaigns and as a consequence of that, neither one was going to collapse,” said Craig Varoga, who advised former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack’s short-lived Democratic bid.

Chuck Raasch is political editor for Gannett News Service. E-mail: craasch@gns.gannett.com.

Gannett News Service
RAASCH COLUMN

CHUCK RAASCH

HAVERFORD, Pa. – Samuel Leath had a burning question for Hillary Clinton.

What, the 19-year-old Haverford College student asked, should he tell people when he campaigns for her in this upscale Philadelphia suburb?

“Just knock on the door and say, ‘You know, she’s really nice,’ ” Clinton responded to laughter and applause at a rally here. “Or you can say, ‘She’s not as bad as you think.’ ”

On a beautiful spring day, it was a cheerier scene than the bitter televised debate between Clinton and her rival, Barack Obama, the night before.

Then, Clinton had maintained that one of her qualifications for the nation’s highest office was that she was by far the most vetted and battle-tested candidate because her enemies had rifled through her “baggage” for years.

Obama was on the defensive over relationships with controversial figures and for statements he’d made about “bitter” small-town Pennsylvanians who “cling” to guns, religion and anti-immigration fervor in tough economic times.

While Clinton and Obama slug it out heading into Tuesday’s Pennsylvania primary, they may be posing a much larger question than who will win.

And that is: Have the Democrats hurt themselves beyond repair in a state that could be pivotal in the November election against presumptive Republican nominee John McCain?

Some think that’s already happened in the six-week preamble to Pennsylvania. During the longest pause in elections and caucuses in the Democrats’ nomination fight so far, the campaign has gone decisively negative.

New York Sen. Clinton has questioned Obama’s fitness to be commander in chief, run ads attacking him for his “bitter” comments and reeled from her admissions she’d overstated the dangers she faced on a 1996 visit to Bosnia. More than half of respondents in a new Gallup Poll don’t think she’s honest or trustworthy.

Obama’s “bitter” gaffe blunted his momentum – he had pulled significantly closer in polls here until last week – and prompted McCain to imply the Illinois senator was an elitist who looked down upon hardworking, small-town Pennsylvanians.

“This is a problem the Democrats have faced ever since it became clear they would fight a long time for this nomination,” said Andrew Polsky, a presidential scholar at Hunter College in New York.

The question over the impact of Pennsylvania’s primary is exacerbated by the reality that even if Clinton wins here – she is slightly ahead in most polls – she is likely to gain only a handful of delegates on Obama among the 158 at stake.

Overall, he leads her by roughly 140 delegates, and is less than 400 short of the number necessary to win the party’s nomination.

Bottom line: Pennsylvania will do little to end the fighting.

James Lee, president of Susquehanna Polling and Research, said that no matter who wins the Democratic nomination, Sen. McCain of Arizona has benefited in Pennsylvania by staying out of the Democrats’ way. But overall, Lee believes Obama will leave Pennsylvania worse off in a potential match against McCain.

Just as the “bitter” controversy was unfolding, Lee was polling state legislative races in what he called “the heart of Reagan Democrat country – Altoona, east of Pittsburgh, right in the heart of” Pennsylvania’s blue-collar Democrat base.

It’s an area derisively referred to as “Pennsytucky” in the liberal enclaves of Philadelphia, but it is the heart of any presidential contest in the Keystone State.

Lee said Clinton led 55 percent to 21 percent in his survey in this area and that Obama’s support “has flat lined there. And that is where he was starting to show some gains.”

Unless Obama wins decisively enough here Tuesday to cause Clinton to back off, the nomination is almost certainly in the collective hands of about 250 superdelegates – elected officials and party leaders – who have yet to commit to either candidate.

If Clinton wins here Tuesday, it will be because she has cobbled together a similar coalition that helped her win last month in Ohio, a strategy that homes in on the economic concerns of moderate and conservative Democrats outside of Philadelphia and Harrisburg.

Obama has been trying to cut into Clinton’s margins in these areas by staging rallies in blue-collar cities such as Erie, where he campaigned Friday, and outspending her by about 2-to-1 on television. His messages focus on economics, family and faith. He’s counting on piling up big margins in Philadelphia and its surrounding suburbs.

But some think this coalition is a prescription for trouble versus McCain in the November general election in the Keystone State.

Lee said his polling in some of the state’s more blue-collar congressional districts shows McCain and Clinton in a virtual dead heat, but McCain retains double-digit leads over Obama in those same districts.

“They are OK with Hillary, but as soon as it is an Obama-McCain matchup, they are back to McCain,” Lee said. “It shows the viability McCain has with these older, hard-line Democrats. They are veterans who identify with John McCain’s background. Pennsylvania is much better positioned for McCain if Obama is the nominee than if Clinton is.”

Chuck Raasch is political editor for Gannett News Service. E-mail: craasch@gns.gannett.com. For Raasch’s Furthermore blog, see this story at www.tucsoncitizen.com/ opinion.

Continued from 1B

VOTERS’ TOP ISSUES

The Associated Press-Yahoo News survey of 1,844 U.S. adults April 2-14 has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.3 percentage points.

Percentage of respondents answering “extremely important” to the question, “How important to you is each of the following issues ?”

Economy 67%

Gas prices 59%

Health care 57%

Social Security 50%

Iraq 48%

Political corruption 48%

Terrorism 46%

Taxes 46%

Housing prices 44%

Immigration 37%