The right targets CNN, ‘undecided voters’

November 17, 2007

In some ways, the Rathergate scandal in 2004 was a mixed blessing for the right. Conservative blogs successfully exposed some documents that were apparently bogus and helped get Dan Rather fired from CBS. They won plaudits, Hinderaker was named Time’s blog of the year, and the whole community of far-right blogs got a chip on their shoulder.

Ever since, they’ve been constantly in search of some new scoop. Every few weeks, they come up with some fascinating discovery, which turns out to be either wrong or silly. The latest deals with a voter who asked a question at the Las Vegas debate on Thursday night.

MALVEAUX: LaShannon Spencer, please stand up for a moment. What is your question?

LASHANNON SPENCER: We constantly hear health care questions and questions pertaining to the war. But we don’t hear questions pertaining to the Supreme Court justice or education. (Applause.) My question is, if you are elected president, what qualities must the appointee possess?

What’s wrong with this? According to some on the right, LaShannon Spencer is a Democrat.

Blitzer introduces her as an “undecided voter” and it sounds like the onscreen graphic mentioned something about her belonging to a church. And … that’s it. The question: Is this the same LaShannon Spencer who served as the Arkansas Democrats’ director of political affairs in 2003? Here’s a photo from four years ago. Annnnnd here’s a screencap from last night. The hair’s different but those glasses sure look familiar….

I went back to the beginning of the debate to see how Blitzer introduced the format. Did he offer any details on who’d be doing the questioning? Why, yes. After mentioning that the debate was sponsored by the national party — something likely understood by most viewers as a mere formality — he described them as “ordinary people, undecided voters.” Note: not even “undecided Democrats.” Just undecided.

I haven’t the foggiest idea why this “observation,” which is drawing plenty of attention on the right, is even remotely interesting.

I haven’t looked into this in any detail, but let’s go ahead and give the right the benefit of the doubt. Let’s say LaShannon Spencer worked for a state Democratic Party a few years ago, and then asked a question at a Democratic debate.

This is provocative, why?

It’s hard to understand exactly what the concern is, but apparently conservatives believe Spencer shouldn’t have been identified as an “undecided voter” or an “ordinary person.” Here’s a crazy idea: what if Spencer is actually undecided among the Democratic candidates? Is there any evidence that she isn’t? And does working for a state party disqualify someone as “ordinary”?

Apparently, the right’s argument includes the notion the television audience should have been told that Spencer is a Democrat. But it was a Democratic debate, hosted by the Nevada Democratic Party, and sponsored by the Democratic National Committee. Was anyone really under the impression that LaShannon Spencer stood to raise a question because she might have been an undecided Republican?

Apparently, this question from the debate has drawn scrutiny as well.

MALVEAUX: Our next question — Khalil Khan, if you would just please stand for a moment. You and I spoke very briefly, and you said you have some concerns about racial profiling.

KHALIL KHAN: Yes, I do. I’m American citizen and have been profiled all the time at the airport. Since 9/11, hundreds of thousands Americans have been profiled. And you know that it is like harassment. And my question is that, that our civil liberties have been taken away from us. What you are going to do to protect Americans from this kind of harassment?

Apparently, Khan is involved in advocating Muslim interests in Las Vegas. And he asked a question about racial profiling. And CNN didn’t tell us that Khan is involved in the Islamic community. Or something.

This is all terribly silly. Please, conservatives, stop looking for your next white whale. There are no awards to be won with such nonsense.

perhaps we should ask for video dossiers on all people speaking from the pre-screened townhalls that gwb mumbles in front of.
after all, it’s one thing to plant questions in an audience. it’s quite another to plant entire audiences!

  • With respect to that debate, I’m an undecided voter. I haven’t decided which Democrat I’m going to vote for.

    It was a debate between Democratic candidates, right?

  • “This is provocative, why?”

    Well for starters, they’re really not very bright in general. (If they were, they wouldn’t be right-wing fruit bats in the first place.)

  • Nothing like a fool who thinks they’ve ‘discovered’ something going “ahaa” when nothing is there. “What did your search of the thief reveal?” “She was wearing a scarf”. “Ahaa! So that’s it. Whom were you planning to strangle?”

    The republican wingnut mind.

  • Umm, I am not completely sure about this, but I don’t believe it has ever been proven that Dan Rather’s documents were actually fake. Does anybody know anything about this? I believe that Hinderaker’s information was inflammatory but also bogus. Anybody?

  • Who cares what the rethugs say. A few more months and they will NEVER be in power again, not even as the local dog catcher. Everyone is sick & tired of the racist policies the neocons have enacted.

  • Pingback: Hot Air » Blog Archive » “Random” questioner at debate was Arkansas Democratic Party officer in 2003?

  • CBS News conceded that they were fake, though I don’t remember any definitive proof either. I think the generally accepted progressive theory is that fake docs were probably planted with the media intentionally by someone like Rove to take the air out of what could have been a very negative story for the Bush re-election campaign, and the reason right-wing blogs were all over it so quickly is because some of them were tipped off the docs were bogus and only had to find some way to prove it. Rove had a history of planting this sort of fake evidence before dating back to the phony bug in his office that he blamed on a Democratic opponent in the 1980s. Also, while the docs themselves might have been copies from the original sources, there is supporting evidence that they described events from Bush’s service as they actually occurred.

  • R.T.Thaddeus,

    The documents Rather got were definitely fake, judging from the scans I’ve seen. I’ve never entirely dismissed the possibility that it could have been a setup. By odd coincidence, I happen to have fairly detailed knowledge of typesetting technology of the period and it took me condiderably longer than LGF to determine that beyond any doubt. But they actually got a head start by starting with the erroneous assumption that typewriters of the 70s couldn’t do superscript or proportional spacing. So more likely it was just dumb luck on their part.

    My best guess it that Bill Burkett may have tried to recreate actual documents that he had personally seen which had since been lost or destroyed. He did seem more than a little troubled (OK, obsessed) by the whole affair so that seems plausible. And of course there never was any evidence of complicity in the forgery on Rather’s part and the larger story was well researched otherwise, based on a solid body of information multiple other sources, none of which was ever even called into question.

    But there’s really no serious question that those Burkett documents were in fact pretty amateurish forgeries. And of course thanks to that fact and the remarkable speed and agility of the right-wing PR machine in capitalizing on the mistake, Bush dodged a legitimate exposé and Dan Rather got the shaft.

  • I just remembered and old joke (c. early 1980s):

    Q: What’s the difference between Ronald Reagan and an IBM Selectric Typewriter?

    A: The typewriter has a memory and a colon and it never falls asleep on the job.

    (And we thought we had it bad then. Yikes.)

  • I assume when the author of this post wrote, “This is provocative, why?” they were being sincere. So here’s my proposal to you. Imagine if at a Republican debate hosted by Fox News they used as questioners:

    A Republican party bigwig
    A pro-war activist
    A free trade [NAFTA] official
    A Christian leader
    A Tom Delay staffer…and…
    An enforcement first immigration activist

    Would that be provocative? Of course. So why would it be if CNN’s six “undecided voters” were:

    A Democratic Party bigwig
    An antiwar activist
    A Union official
    An Islamic leader
    A Harry Reid staffer
    A radical Chicano separatist

    It would. And it should.

  • You’ve purposefully misunderstood the issue, although how significant it is has been blown a bit out of proportion by the conservative blogs.

    The problem here is that instead of calling on “ordinary folks”, CNN seems to have a line-up of people who are not “ordinary”. They are all obviously Democrats, which sort of makes sense at a Democratic debate, but they try to give the impression that these are randomly selected people. They aren’t. These are people who’ve worked for politicians, worked for campaigns, worked for interest groups.

    Why can’t CNN just call on the receptionist from Kansas? The car mechanic from Minnesota? Ah, because everything needs to be scripted, vetted, polished, and their actors have to be pre-selected and vouched for by Democratic Party reps.

    It’s all an act. Give us real Americans asking real questions.

  • “Give us real Americans asking real questions.”

    So then the folks asking those questions aren’t real Americans?

    Interesting.

    • Comments are closed.