You would think 30%-40% profits would be sufficient, but I guess when big oil and big pharma are raking it in even faster, newspapers just have to make deeper cuts to keep up with the Joneses.

It's become an incredibly short-sighted industry, as I've seen firsthand -- cutting newsroom jobs, freezing hiring, pushing back raises -- with the only goal to make more money tomorrow. This obviously is undercutting the ability to deliver quality news coverage over the long run. I guess readers are just expected to not notice or to have no other choices.

Publishers with actual journalism experience have become an extremely rare breed. If you've noticed a decline in the quality of news coverage in your paper, keep in mind that it's all about the bottom line.

 At some point these "Democratic" beltway elites need to be challenged and confronted -- WHY, EXACTLY, ARE YOU A DEMOCRAT?

 We win the election, and certain "Democrats" immediately declare that we won't win again if we actually try to do what the voters put us in to do.

 For Democrats to pooh-pooh the importance of labor  -- which is only the 97% of Americans who work for someone else -- is both a betrayal of the party's core values and short-sighted to the extreme. If we don't stand up for labor, who will? And if we don't stand up for labor, why should labor vote for us?

 And as an aside, why is it so hard to get REAL liberals on the op-ed pages of major newspapers? You know, the kinds who WILL proudly speak up for labor?

 It's frustrating that these triangulating stand-for-nothings still have a voice in our media. That's why I spread the blog gospel (blogspel?) everywhere I go...

I'm surprised to see Ickes lumped in with Emmanuel and Stoyer. My recollection is that he was the Clintons' link to labor, and a true believer on real health insurance reform?

This is the sort of poke at the establishment eye that first brought me to MyDD.

If you're able to, post it on the HuffingtonPost.com.

They make people like Steny Hoyer and Rahm Emanuel uncomfortable because they demand good policy choices

The unspoken (unwritten) elaboration in that clause is about demanding politically risky policy choices... yes, they demand good choices, but those choices will require, y'know, defending.  Conviction.  Accepting & even welcoming serious opposition. Persuasion.  IOW, sticking their necks out, which is just too anxiety-generating for too many DC Dems.  Bottom line is that the positions Edsall takes are those of people with relatively weak convictions and not that much courage to defend the convictions they do claim.

Not that that's news here, of course.

I think that an eye on Rep. Barney Frank is warranted. In a recent speech in Boston he stated that he is a capitalist and therefore in favor of inequality. He also talked about making deals with the business community to achieve certain goals many of which were progressive. Here's a point as chairman of the finance committee a simple think he could do would be to insure that the NLRB was staffed equally weighted with union and business people and that further NLRB rulings had teeth, enforceability. If unions were given a level playing field we would see a slow but steady drive to right the imbalance the Right has created and an increased visibility of the public dialogue that needs to take place. We don't need national pols steering the debate, we need worker reps at the State and local level doing it.

Time to start thinking about our own Civil War:  Ickes, Shrum, and the rest of the Lieber-kind who attached themselves to the Clintons and Gore like remora, including Hoyer, are busy coalescing with the "moderate" GOP and now present a serious challenge to the New Democratic Party, the one which ran the table on the GOP a couple weeks ago.

We have one of their gunslingers, Carville, launching a pre-emptive strike on Howard Dean, we have a LOT of sniping and grousing and media-led witch-hunting of Pelosi, Murtha, Hastings, Kucinich:  we have a problem.  They are joining in with wingnuttia and the Media Wurlitzer in fostering this myth that the only reason we won is because Dems moved to the RIGHT?

We worked and worked and bled and fought and won and finally pried the keys from the cold dead hands of the Republicans, and now we're getting "Gimme the keys and move over, Junior, time to let the grown-ups drive"??!?

Bullshit!!  The NeoLibs and their tired wasteland of triangulation, dirty compromise, and K-Street lobbyist pandering are over.  They are goin' DOWN, baby.

And I will gladly pee on the corpses.

This is a new time, a new opportunity. WE, the young, the committed Internet-savvy Progressives hold the keys to the Dem Party's future, and we turn them over at our peril.  We've already seen what they know how to do, and I want no part of it.  America wants no part of it.  Like the Big Dog said:  We have no mandate, only a chance to make things better.

On a week when the Senate honored Paul Wellstone, let us similarly dedicate ourselves to honor the proposition that government FOR the people is too important to let these people have another try at it.  

It's them, or us.

THEY are responsible for Bush's apocalyptic 8 years in office, more than anyone else.

I saw him speak a couple weeks ago on a panel with other progressive leaders and he basically said what he said in this column, which I find not only amazingly pessimistic but really stupid.

If I have to abandon my ideals that people should be treated fairly and everyone should have a fair shot in order to gain power (as Edsall suggests) then why would I bother trying to gain power?

The point of the progressive movement isn't just to have power for the sake of it, it's to have power so that we can help people on an individual level and help our country on a national level - if Edsall doesn't get that, I can't help him.

Edsall just sort of shrugged his shoulders, and said that it's not his responsibility to focus on that story because he's not an editor of the paper and doesn't make the choices about what to cover.  

Newspapers have a big payroll, complex distribution, heavy fixed costs, a dying revenue model: little wonder that their standard fare is warmed-over CW for the toffs and tabloid sensation for the rest.

On the other hand, when did they last do anything else?

To talk about

how firmly the intellectual core of journalism has rotted

When was that exactly? Name the year!

Aside from that magnificently atypical period around the end of the Vietnam war and Watergate, the press was and is some mixture of partisanship, proprietorial ax-grinding, money-grubbing and official propaganda.

(Best treatise on the morality of journalism: Ace in the Hole.)

More broadly - who can say anything worth saying in the format of a 700 word op-ed? You're practically required to make inane or plainly counterfactual generalizations that are not worth the bandwith (even when not stuck behind a pay-wall!).

I think it's a interesting question to what extent the election was an endorsement of Dem policies as well as a rejection of the Iraq fubar and the general decrepitude in the regime.

(I'd certainly not take the point for granted.)

Similarly, I think it's valid to consider the influence of interest groups on Dem policy - and the public perception of such interest - both currently, and in a historical context.

But, in a 700 word op-ed, you can only shout slogans and retail gossip.

Last thing, related to this: just because an issue gets a crappy treatment in the media doesn't mean it's a real issue.

Harking back to Matt's earlier Pelosi/Harman piece, just because the Pelosi/Harman relationship can be portrayed in an utterly implausible cartoonish fashion doesn't mean that the relationship is not worthy of study, nor that it may influence important decisions for good or ill.

That gurgling sound coming from the plug-hole: is that bath-water or baby?

Hear, hear, Matt! Good show!

Additionally, I'd say what voters rebelled against in 1994 was the comfort and ethical transgressions of entrenched party elites, not any specific policy position deemed as 'too liberal'.

It was the culmination of the S&L scandal and the discontent of many whose wages had largely stagnated for twenty years because of the outstanding bills of Vietnam, of decades of exploitative policies towards oil countries (Iran and Iraq especially) that triggered the formation of OPEC and anti-Western extremism, and the Reagan overspending on the military (which the rightists have successfully spun as the Commie-killing maneuver, instead of the economy killing maneuver which took the tech revolution to overcome).

And the biggest impediment going forward now will be paying off the costs of Bush's war-profiteering gambits.

Big Labor, of course, had its own entrenched with ethical problems to overcome, and it's heartening to see the SEIU as the rising Young Turk in the mix today, to help defeat the lingering anti-union mood in right-to-being-exploited states.

The DLC strategy of eking out plurality wins in a badly polarized electorate was always a short-term campaign strategy, not a long-term vision for enlightened leadership. Keep on challenging guys like Edsall for their promotion of tactical maneuvers into a social ideology.

Americans seek economic security, but not at the cost of their civil liberties, their available time with family and friends, or at the cost of hard won social advances.

Keep on destroying their (DLC) paper-thin myths!

Vichy Dem, remember?

What's so complicated or surprising about that?

He's always been a Beltway insider, always will.  End of story.  He was, at one time, amongst the most perceptive of them.  For all I know, he still is.  But that no longer means very much any more.

Edsall's not dead?

Wow, "behind the NYT pay-wall" isn't the polite euphemism I thought it was?

I don't know about you Matt but with a $9 trillion dollar debt I'm not in favor of expanding government. I'm in favor of fixing it after the last 6 years of disastrous Republican rule. Once we get costs and the budget under control and get a Dem president so we can replace all the "brownies" with professional managers then we can start talking about adding more services. Then we have to fix Medicare. But that's a long way off, probably a decade. Until that's done more services are out of the question.  

Sounds like you need some new friends.

Harold Ickes is an uber-insider but he's not an elitist. He had a kidney beaten out of him for doing voter registration work in Louisiana in 1966. His worst sin is being a Clinton loyalist which is hardly a sin. Edsall might not associate much with labor but Ickes surely does as he spent the better part of his life representing labor unions as their lawyer.  Ickes is a New Deal Democrat, not least because his father was the point man for FDR pushing it through. Ickes might be a prickly SOB but he's a prickly SOB on our side.

More on Harold Ickes (ick'iss):
Profile from the Laborers-LIUNA website (NYDN)
http://www.laborers.org/nyd_Ickes_10-10- 00.htm

A recent article by Todd S. Purdum in Vanity Fair contains some revealing information about Karl Rove, but nothing, I felt, was more revealing than the information about Purdom himself, who apparently lives in top-tax-bracket DC home near Rove's.

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/featu res/2006/12/rove200612

Guys making 200K above Guild Scale, the fuck do they care about unions?

Lemme tell you a story Years ago, an enterprising guy named Izzo who liked to eat wrote a book called, "A Forkful of San Jose," which was a collection of restaurant reviews. Lots of people were moving into San Jose back then, and since they didn't know shit from carbon paper about where to go out to eat, they bought up these books by the stackful.

The San Jose Mercury News hired this Izzo has its restaurant reviewer. They gave an expense account so that the owners of the spaghetti palaces and taco bars couldn't bribe him with free food.

Well, in a matter of time, Izzo lost interest in writing about where to get the biggest San Jose hero sandwich at the best price, and started checking out places in Palo Alto, San Francisco, even Los Angeles.

He would write, "we had a bottle of both the red and the white wines the waiter suggested and, although priced at $65 each, we felt they were quite reasonable."

This from a fat fuck who previously recommended taking the extra large pizza home so you could drink your own Safeway beer with it.

If a small-town chowhound can get corrupted within 12 months of eating off white tablecloths, what can we expect from NY Times guys who eat a hot dog, should they be confronted by one, with a knife and fork?

Like this:

Thomas Fremantle Edsall

Arthur Fremantle was the Brit who, having observed the Confederate army in action in 1863, predicted their victory in a book that arrived on these shores in early 1865.

Like Edsall, his timing was just a wee bit off.

It is good to see I wasn't the only one surprised at today's NY editorial.  Edsall does not deserve to be a columnist.  He is analysis is over a decade old.  

What he implies is preposterous.  What do these old liberals want?  Return to school busing?  70% marginal tax rate?  Resurrect the Black Panter movement?  Job and college quotas for minorities and women?

Thus the new liberals (Tester, Webb, Sherrod Brown) are advocating the same economic populism and protect-our-constitution that is consistent with old liberals like Charlie Rangel, John Conyers, Henry Waxman, John Dingel, and George Miller.  They have though updated the description of the countries problems in a way to convince voters to elect them.

However, as Edsall doesn't realize, the debate has changed.  Businesses are now advocating for government intervention in health care cost.  The concentration of wealth is so great now, there is a ground swell for minimum wage, fair trade policies, and fair taxation.  Pay as you go is fiscal responsibility.  Ethics reform is a Democratic issue as it is consistent with transparent government and fair elections and importantly not practiced by the Republicans.

This country may be center-right in rhetoric, but it is center-left in sensibilities.  The majority of the people know we need a government and there needs to taxes to pay for it, so tax-cut zombyism and extreme economic libertarians will never be accepted. On social issues I still maintain it is on average in the center, but with uncompromising factions on each side of the spectrum (especially on abortion). So the suggestions of the progressive movement are really proposed solutions to real problems.  What was "far left" is now mainstream or no longer seriously discussed.

And as an aside, why is it so hard to get REAL liberals on the op-ed pages of major newspapers? You know, the kinds who WILL proudly speak up for labor?

Okay, let's launch a campaign to get a real liberal (besides Bob Herbert or Molly Ivins) on the op-ed page.  Sam Seder, anyone?

Lauren: Thom Hartman. Robert Reich.

A recent diary at Kos has a take on Edsall: <www.dailykos.com/story/2006/11/25/175634/24>.  Sorry for the cold link.

Best regards

Thank you for this post---I started reading that Edsall column earlier today, and blinked at about paragraph 2 and thought, "What?" I stopped reading and skipped to the byline. If I had to guess, his broken record act is like an attempt to sell books and stay pertinent for about thirty more seconds. When it's clear to everyone else that his clock on this idea has run out.

We are reliving decades old battles?

Well then who are the dumbasses that wave the Confederate flags - a century old battle?

     Um, the shift in the total electorate was five percent from 2004. This was achieved by Hurricane Katrina, the War in Iraq, Foley, the Evangelical Ted teggard, poor economy, high gas prices, Bush approval at 35%-40%, etc. Now explain to me how this is a win for the Democrats, and not just a catastrophe that was going to hit the Republicans no matter what? It seems to me that the country is about fifty fifty. If it takes this much crap to switch the country by five points to the left, while it takes nothing to switch it to the right (1994, 2002), then I am very worried. Liberals won this time out, yes, but this was due to the fact that people just hated the Republicans. Do I think people hate liberal ideas? No, but I do think people are apathetic about them. I know the polls say so otherwise, but the polls say all sorts of random crap. I mean, hey, what was the top reason for married white women in 2002 to vote Republican? To protect SOCIAL SECURITY for crying out loud!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The idea that popular support in polls, or at the voting booth, means that the public is committed to this stuff is ridiculous. I just hope that Republicans and independents just tune out and stop voting. If they don't, then we're going to see the Democrats in trouble. Also, don't forget that the media is the Republican party's propaganda arm. Never forget that.

Just want to say this is a fantastic article, Matt. Everyone should also check out Harold Meyerson's excellent piece The Fair-Trade Election" in The American Prospect.

Steven Josselson