Maybe it’s not a political loser after all

March 27, 2007

Just over the last few days, much of the media establishment has decided that Democrats are running against public opinion by pursuing the prosecutor purge scandal. Americans, pundits tell us, just don’t agree with Dems on this one.

David Broder said there’s no political upside, so Dems should focus attention elsewhere. John Harwood and Brian Williams said Dems are risking a “backlash.” Time managing editor Richard Stengel claimed that he is “so uninterested in the Democrats wanting Karl Rove because it is so bad for them, because it shows business as usual, tit for tat, vengeance,” adding: “That’s not what voters want to see.”

The media’s assumptions about the public’s perspective appear wildly misplaced.

Americans overwhelmingly support a congressional investigation into White House involvement in the firing of eight U.S. attorneys, and they say President Bush and his aides should answer questions about it without invoking executive privilege.

In a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken Friday-Sunday, respondents said by nearly 3-to-1 that Congress should issue subpoenas to force White House officials to testify.

In fact, the results weren’t even close. Asked whether Congress should investigate the White House’s involvement in the controversy, 72% said lawmakers should pursue the matter. Asked if White House officials should invoke executive privilege or answer all questions, 68% prefer the latter. Asked if Congress should issue subpoenas to force testimony, 68% said yes. And by a 2-to-1 margin, poll respondents said the U.S. Attorneys were fired for political reasons, not job performance.

As Glenn Greenwald concluded:

I would never dream of coming to this blog and just start making assertions that “Americans believe X” or “Americans oppose Y” unless I had actual evidence to support those claims. That’s because I would not expect readers of this blog to view what I write as being credible if I just spewed assertions with no empirical basis like that. No credible blogger would do that. Why don’t pundits on MSNBC — including the Managing Editor of Time Magazine — recognize those same basic constraints?

Good question.

Other purge-related stories worth noting:

* The White House appears ready to throw Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty under the bus, sharing an unreleased email with ABC News demonstrating that McNulty was told not to comment on administrative personnel matters, but he testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee anyway. In other words, McNulty is to blame because he was ineffective in maintaining the White House’s cover-up.

* Roll Call reports that the White House is “doing little privately to lobby Republican Senators to get behind the embattled Justice Department chief, according to senior Senate sources. In fact, Senate Republicans said Monday that the administration essentially has been absent when it comes to courting defenders for the attorney general, who has been under fire for the controversial dismissal of eight U.S. attorneys. The only outreach from the executive branch so far to save Gonzales’ job, those Senate sources said, has come from the attorney general himself.”

* White House Spokesperson Dana Perino looked confused and embarrassed during a press briefing yesterday when reporters noted the importance of a CNN transcript in defending Gonzales. A reporter pointed out that Perino’s defense of Gonzales “illustrate[s] perfectly why a transcript is necessary.” Perino responded, “I see your point,” sparking laughter from reporters.

* The House easily passed a measure yesterday that repeals the portion of the Patriot Act that allows the Attorney General to make indefinite interim appointments of U.S. Attorneys. The Senate passed the same measure last week.

* For the administration to go after Carol Lam on immigration prosecutions doesn’t make any sense.

* San Diego Union Tribune: “Two weeks after then-U.S. Attorney Carol Lam ordered a raid on the home and offices of a former CIA official last year – a search prompted by her investigation of now-imprisoned former Rep. Randy ‘Duke’ Cunningham – higher-ups at the Justice Department privately questioned whether they should give her more money and manpower. ‘There are good reasons not to provide extensive resources to (Lam),’ Bill Mercer, acting associate attorney general, wrote to Kyle Sampson, who was chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales until he resigned a couple of weeks ago.” (thanks to reader J.S.)

Stay tuned.

Why don’t pundits on MSNBC — including the Managing Editor of Time Magazine — recognize those same basic constraints?

Indeed. You might think they were hacks, when you actually look at what they’ve been doing. Kinda explains why they hate bloggers so much, eh?

Big Media, meet your own crap. There it is on the carpet. And yeah, that’s a lowly blogger’s hand on your neck, mashing your pretty, millionaire face into it.

Now stop crapping on the carpet, or we’ll get out the newspaper.

  • I don’t know why it is so bad for the Dems to go after Rove or Cheney or try to impeach Bush.
    Clinton’s impeachment did not hurt Bill Clinton but remember who won the next two Presidential elections.
    When I hear Rham Emmanuel say impeachment is off the table, I say he’d better listen to the voters and not his sense of the situation.

  • based on the poll numbers you quote above, it looks like its down to the extreme right-wingers (the under 30%ers) still supporting the white house on this one. i think we’re gonna start finding this consistent result over the next few weeks and months…….

  • Take the political calculation out of it and make it about responsible stewardship of the principles and foundations of the democracy – that’s really what this is all about.

    That such an approach would have positive political consequences for Democrats, and for every Republican who chooses to be on that side would be fine, but what is important is rescuing the democracy from those who have given all indications that they seek absolute power,and are willing to do whatever it takes to get it.

  • This concerted effort to tell the Dems not to look deeply in to this matter and bugger off instead is a sure tell sign that there’s some thing there. How this investigation is being pursued is the exact opposite of Travelgate, Vincent Foster’s suicide, the Lewinsky mess and all the other Clinton-era controversies: the Democratic investigators are being very measured and cautious in their language while the White House is engaged in a one-sided flame war to discredit the them. The witch hunt is not coming from the Democrats, it’s the right wingers that are carrying the torches and throwing the wild accusations.

    Besides, why should we listen any of the naysayers? When was the last time any of these pundits cautioning the Dems away from a thorough investigation have been correct about anything?

  • “72%, 68%, 68%, 2-to-1 margin”. This is not happening in a vacuum. Consistently, on issue after issue, President Bush has lost the support of the American public. From Katrina, to trickle-down vacuum-up economics, to Iraq, all but the true believers have lost confidence in this administration and have tuned out the Republicant talking points.

    Fox News is down, Olbermann is up – I guess it will take awhile for the chattering pundits on Chris Matthews’ Show to recognize it.

  • Haven’t you guys figured this out? These are the same guys who tell us, to quote the Rolling Stones:

    When I’m watchin’ my TV
    And a man comes on to tell me
    How white my shirts can be
    But he can’t be a man ’cause he doesn’t smoke
    The same cigarrettes as me

    Come on, get with the program. It doesn’t matter whether it’s true, all that matter is whether people believe it. Note the emphasis in so much of the Right’s rhetoric about “believing” this or that, what happened to “knowing” and “facts”?

  • I doubt that impeachment will be a winner for the democrats, and I’m quite sure that the votes aren’t present to remove Bush or Cheney, but I’m becoming convinced that impeachment is necessary in order to shut down all the bad precedents set by Bush and to start to repair all the damage done to the constitution by the lying thieving incompetent Republicans in power over the last six years.

  • I get the NY Times, and was very disappointed on Sunday to open the Week in Review section and find not an article on the U.S. attorney scandal but an article wondering if the Democrats risked going too far.

    The attorney general himself may be guilty of obstruction of justice under presidential orders, but the “liberal New York Times” is tsk-tsking that the Democrats may be pushing their luck!

    Even if that were true, and it isn’t, I’d say that’s a risk the Democrats are going to have to take in order to do the people’s business–and as for our entire journalist establishment, it’s high time they focused on the story, not the politics. From David Broder on down they claim to disparage politics, and yet here’s a story that’s really a story, and they’re still fetishizing the goddamn politics.

  • RE: Comment 10 by pk

    Today’s New York Times put the story about Goodling invoking the Fifth Amendment rather than testify before the Senate on page A-17. A high-ranking official of the Justice Department, an assistant to the Attorney General is invoking the Fifth Amendment!! When was the last time something like that happened? Shouldn’t it be front page news? I will grant that the Times editorial page spoke about it, but if the story is importnat enough to warrant an editorial, shouldn’t it have gotten front page treatment?

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