Two days, two takes from The Washington Post on Michele Bachmann’s language.
On Sunday, the Post coined the icky term “money blurt” to describe what it calls the “phenomenon” of “an up-and-coming politician blurt[ing] out something incendiary, provocative or otherwise controversial” which then “bounces around the blogs and talk shows” (but never, not ever, the newspapers) and “becomes a sensation” off of which the politician can then raise “bucket of cash.”
Or, as New York magazine put it, “Does it ever seem like there’s a cash reward for the politician who can say the craziest thing? Well, there sort of is.”
More Post:
The phenomenon marks another phase in the quest for money in politics, fueled by the eternal hum of the Internet, social media and 24-hour cable news. The tactic could prove especially valuable for insurgent candidates such as Bachmann who are likely to rely heavily on smaller donations for their 2012 campaigns.
The Post analyzed FEC data and “television appearances” and determined that Bachmann is “the real champion of money blurts.” To wit:
The first clear example came in October 2008, before Obama’s election, when Bachmann, on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” said, “I am very concerned that he may have anti-American views.” Bachmann, who until then was not particularly well known nationally, raised almost $1 million over the next few weeks, records show.
In the summer of 2010, Bachmann made a flurry of appearances on news and talk programs to tout her new Tea Party Caucus and ratchet up her criticism of Obama, including suggesting that impeachment might be a good idea. She also accused Obama of “infantilism” and “turning our country into a nation of slaves.”
Bachmann reeled in more than $5 million in contributions during the third quarter of 2010, her best fundraising period, FEC records show.
Also? That congressman who yelled “You lie!” at President Obama while Obama addressed Congress in 2009? He raised $2 million “within a week of the outburst…urged on by conservative bloggers” and his own campaign, the Post reports.
Towards the article’s end, the Post concedes (the to be sure! bit), “It’s hard to tell how much of the money-blurt phenomenon is truly spontaneous…or whether some outbursts are timed for maximum financial impact.” You mean even their outbursts—er, blurts—are calculated?
While Bachmann’s blurting may be so money, her blinking is apparently less so. In another Post piece, “body language expert” Carol Kinsey Goman (oh yes, campaign season is upon us!) assesses Bachmann’s apparently winning body language during last week’s debate. According to Goman, Bachmann projected “authority” by “wearing high heels, standing tall and keeping her shoulders back.” And:
[U]nlike the other candidates, Bachmann also had the warm-cue advantage of “baby face bias,” a term used to describe the tendency found in human beings across all age ranges and cultures to read innocence and candor in faces with features that are similar to an infant’s. (These characteristics include a round head, big eyes, small nose, high forehead and short chin.)
And yet, not all of Bachmann’s body language boded well. Writes Goman:
Bachmann’s only body language error may have been a cosmetic one: her decision to wear false eyelashes. Researchers who analyze politicians’ blink rate find that fast blinkers rarely win elections. Blink rates increase under stress, and they signal a candidate’s nonverbal reaction to pressure. While Romney has a fairly low blink rate, Bachmann has a moderately high one, and the false eyelashes she wore during the debate made her blinks much more obvious than those of her competitors.
Blink.
@Liz, I wonder if you have any insight on this:
which then “bounces around the blogs and talk shows” (but never, not ever, the newspapers)
Why is this kind of incendiary speech by Republicans, even to the point of advocating violence, racism, assassination, never reported in newspapers or on mainstream cable or networks?
If you think about incidents such as Wes Clark's completely innocuous statement "I don't think being shot down in an airplane qualifies someone to be President" well there was a big media frenzy for three or four days about that, effectively ending his political career. It's been done to Pelosi, to John Kerry, to a number of Democrats. The media takes snippets of a statement or a piece of writing, severely distorts its meaning, and goes on for days and days. It is the talk of the day on cable, gets reported on the evening news, every political columnist weighs in, and then it gets reported in the newspaper AS a controversy.
This kind of media frenzy only happens to Democrats. Meanwhile, the Republicans can be as nutty as they want, incendiary and racist as they want, say the craziest things, and it never gets reported: it never makes the evening news, it doesn't get into the newspapers, political columnists don't write about it, and daytime cable don't even talk about it. I've been noticing this literally for years.
Why is that? Why don't respectable reporters report this kind of stuff when Republicans do it, but they do it to Democrats? Any ideas?
#1 Posted by James, CJR on Tue 21 Jun 2011 at 10:38 PM
To go a couple further, Rick Perry, who is being considered a republican contender, advocated secession over the stimulus. Okay, maybe that's weak.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/15/gov-rick-perry-texas-coul_n_187490.html
How about Pat Buchanan defending Hitler?
http://buchanan.org/blog/did-hitler-want-war-2068
There is a class of people incapable of shame and who have both a following and institutional backing that don't care about faux pas, gotchas, or basic competency. They are republicans. They care about winning. They are waging a perpetuatal campaign - a term drawn from war - and don't care about how the game is won. they just want to claim victory in the political superbowl.
#2 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 21 Jun 2011 at 11:40 PM
Then there are the democrats. DLC type dems. They seem to care less about winning and more about not looking stupid. They crave approval, be it from wealthy donors or red state wife beaters. The people that support them they don't consider important. It's the approval they don't have that tickles their loins. They abandon their platforms more than they defend them, they'll drop their own people as soon as they do something slightly uncool.
Which brings us to the media. On the one hand they have attack dog politics from the right, people and institutions drooling for the opportunity to rip into a journalist for saying something they don't like, and on the other they have puppy politics, people and institutions begging for attention and affirmation and just want to be petted and loved. Of course the brave journalists are going to kick the puppies. Do you think anyone willingly wants to wrestle with the attack dogs who could be sniffing around their emails and family members as we speak?
While this guy was involved in this:
http://www.juancole.com/2005/02/goldberg-v.html
"But Goldberg is just a dime a dozen pundit. Cranky rich people hire sharp-tongued and relatively uninformed young people all the time and put them on the mass media to badmouth the poor, spread bigotry, exalt mindless militarism, promote anti-intellectualism, and ensure generally that rightwing views come to predominate even among people who are harmed by such policies. One of their jobs is to marginalize progressives by smearing them as unreliable."
The CIA was doing this:
http://www.juancole.com/2011/06/retd-cia-official-alleges-bush-white-house-used-agency-to-get-cole.html
"Eminent National Security correspondent at the New York Times James Risen has been told by a retired former official of the Central Intelligence Agency that the Bush White House repeatedly asked the CIA to spy on me with a view to discovering “damaging” information with which to discredit my reputation. Glenn Carle says he was called into the office of his superior, David Low, in 2005 and was asked of me, “ ‘What do you think we might know about him, or could find out that could discredit him?’ ""
Which public figure wants that kind of hassle?
#3 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 21 Jun 2011 at 11:42 PM
And in other news, how's that Anthony Weiner story going?.. you know, the one before everyone began discussing his bulging personality?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/43473364#43473364
#4 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 22 Jun 2011 at 01:13 AM
Thanks for chiming in, @James and @Thimbles.
@James, when I added "but never, not ever, the newspapers" to the Post's point about these controversies bouncing around "the blogs and talk shows" and becoming "a sensation" off of which politicians can then raise "buckets of cash," I was being sarcastic. I was adding what I felt the Post left out: that these things "bounce around" the papers, too.
For example, I found multiple mentions in the WaPo in October 2008 of Bachmann's comment on "Hardball" that she was "very concerned that [Obama] may have anti-American views,” the comment off of which Bachmann was able, the Post wrote on Sunday, to raise almost $1 million over the next couple of weeks. (One of those mentions in the WaPo back in '08, I now see, came in a story that said Bachmann was actually "struggling" after that comment, that "in the immediate aftermath" of that comment Bachmann's opponent, "whose campaign seemed close to finished before the controversy, received a massive influx of donations, to the tune of more than $1.5 million." I guess that information didn't fit into the Post's "money blurt" story.)
#5 Posted by Liz Cox Barrett, CJR on Wed 22 Jun 2011 at 10:30 AM
Don't forget how Ms. Sawyer turned Howard Dean's pep rally yell into "The Scream".
#6 Posted by Elmo, CJR on Wed 22 Jun 2011 at 12:18 PM
@Liz, thanks for your response, and thanks for the clarification. Dohhhh. Went completely over my head. Sorry. (face-hand, sheepish grin.)
Still, even though Bachmann's statement was "mentioned" none of this stuff on the Republican side every becomes a media frenzy in the way I described above. -- every news show, every pundit, every reporter making it the lead story of the day, playing it over and over again for days and days and a very shrill manner, analysis of the analysis, reporters interviewing each other over the meaning of it all. Only Democrats get that kind of treatment. I could give example after example of that.
What drives this kind of media frenzy? Seriously. I've been trying to dissect the mechanism of how these play out for literally years. But I lack the insider operational knowledge. I've asked other journos, but they are less than forthcoming, either because they are in denial about it, or because they are too shallow to have given it much thought.
#7 Posted by James, CJR on Wed 22 Jun 2011 at 01:47 PM
Taibbi presents a dystopic vision.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/michele-bachmanns-holy-war-20110622
"Images of Michele Bachmann squatting behind a bush or hiding from lesbians in a bathroom would seem to be punch lines of funny stories, but they are not. The real punch line is that rather than destroying her politically, these incidents helped propel her into Congress. In her first two races, in 2006 and 2008, she defeated experienced, credible opponents who failed to realize what they were dealing with until it was too late. Her 2006 win was an especially extraordinary testament to her electoral viability. In a terrible year for conservatives, with the death-spiraling Bush administration taking Republican seats down with them all over the country, Bachmann won a fairly independent district by an eight-point margin. In her runs for Congress, Bachmann discovered — or perhaps it is more accurate to say we all discovered — that a total absence of legislative accomplishment and a complete inability to tell the truth or even to identify objective reality are no longer hindrances to higher office...
Snickering readers in New York or Los Angeles might be tempted by all of this to conclude that Bachmann is uniquely crazy. But in fact, such tales by Bachmann work precisely because there are a great many people in America just like Bachmann, people who believe that God tells them what condiments to put on their hamburgers, who can't tell the difference between Soviet Communism and a Stafford loan, but can certainly tell the difference between being mocked and being taken seriously. When you laugh at Michele Bachmann for going on MSNBC and blurting out that the moon is made of red communist cheese, these people don't learn that she is wrong. What they learn is that you're a dick, that they hate you more than ever, and that they're even more determined now to support anyone who promises not to laugh at their own visions and fantasies...
Even other Republicans, it seems, are making the mistake of laughing at Bachmann. But consider this possibility: She wins Iowa, then swallows the Tea Party and Christian vote whole for the next 30 or 40 primaries while Romney and Pawlenty battle fiercely over who is the more "viable" boring-white-guy candidate. Then Wall Street blows up again — and it's Barack Obama and a soaring unemployment rate versus a white, God-fearing mother of 28 from the heartland.
It could happen. Michele Bachmann has found the flaw in the American Death Star. She is a television camera's dream, a threat to do or say something insane at any time, the ultimate reality-show protagonist. She has brilliantly piloted a media system that is incapable of averting its eyes from a story, riding that attention to an easy conquest of an overeducated cultural elite from both parties that is far too full of itself to understand the price of its contemptuous laughter. All of those people out there aren't voting for Michele Bachmann. They're voting against us. And to them, it turns out, we suck enough to make anyone a contender."
#8 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 22 Jun 2011 at 11:36 PM