BIDEN RIPS BUSH
From NBC's Domenico Montanaro
Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee absolutely tore into President George W. Bush for his comments from Israel, which appeared to take a swipe at Obama.
Bush said this morning, “Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement."
An exasperated Biden skewered Bush over that in a conference call with reporters, calling the comments “pure politics,” “blatant,” “beneath the presidency,” “truly disgraceful,” “outrageous,” “disturbing,” “ridiculous hypocrisy” and “long-distance Swiftboating.” He even said Bush “oughta get a life.”
“For this president to go on the attack against Barack Obama,” Biden said. “It cannot go unanswered.” [Possible veep audition?]
Coupling Bush’s comments with McCain’s assertion that it’s clear who Hamas wants to be president, Biden said he sees “an ugly pattern emerging.”
He said the president should “get in touch with his administration.”
“I assume he’s going to fire his Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense,” Biden said. “They want engagement of Iran.”
He went on. “This is the kind of political rhetoric which continues to masquerade as policy,” Biden said. “All they have is masquerades.”
And… “This is why we’re in the situation we’re in,” he said, as he criticized Bush for “demonizing” Democrats.
Bush “should try to figure out how to dig us out of the God awful hole this president has gotten us into.” He added that when he travels abroad, “I don’t criticize the president” --no matter how much they might disagree on various facets of foreign policy. In fact, he said he has defended the president when abroad.
Biden also sharply criticized Bush’s -- and John McCain’s, for that matter -- Mideast policy, or in McCain’s case lack thereof, Biden said. He called Bush’s policy an “abject failure,” “truly delusional” and “backwards.”
“The president’s saber rattling has been the most self-defeating policy imaginable … spurs instability in the Middle East … increase in price of oil … plays into the hands of those Iranian leaders he rails against.
“Since when, since when has talking removed no from the American vocabulary.
More: “This is the same president, who talks about appeasement, the same one who asks me to get on a plane and talk to Qaddafi,” Biden said. “The same president who made a deal with Qaddafi. He writes letters, ‘Dear Mr. Chairman’ to Kim Jong Il.
“He oughta get a life here … Under George W. Bush’s watch, Iran, not freedom has been on the march … They’re a lot closer to the bomb… He calls Maliki our guy … Whose policy produced that? Whose watch was that? … Iran’s proxy Hezbollah is on the ascendancy. Don’t take my word for it, look at NIE … Afghanistan, Pakistan, Al Qaeda is stronger now.
“We should take zero backseat to this pres, talking about appeasement. … Under him, Israel is less safe.”
Biden also admitted to initially calling Bush’s comments “bull----.”
“I reacted viscerally,” he said. “But the essence of what I said was accurate. I should have said malarkey.”
Friday, May 16, 2008
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Conservative Talk Radio
Stuff like this really bugs me. They find the loudest mouth possible and let him scream and shout. At least this time Chris Matthews stands up and calls Kevin James out on not knowing any history and just blurting out catch phrases and slogans. Rule #1 of debating...Know your subject.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Religion and Politics
Young, evangelical ... for Obama?
By Haley Edwards
JIM BATES / THE SEATTLE TIMES
Michael Dudley is the son of a preacher man.
He's a born-again Christian with two family members in the military. He grew up in the Bible Belt, where almost everyone he knew was Republican. But this fall, he's breaking a handful of stereotypes: He plans to vote for Democrat Barack Obama.
"I think a lot of Christians are having trouble getting behind everything the Republicans stand for," said Dudley, 20, a sophomore at Seattle Pacific University.
Dudley's disenchantment with the GOP isn't unique among young, devoutly Christian voters. According to a September 2007 survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, 15 percent of white evangelicals between 18 and 29, a group traditionally a shoo-in for the GOP, say they no longer identify with the Republican Party. Older evangelicals are also questioning their traditional allegiance, but not at the same rate.
But, Howard Dean, don't count your chickens quite yet. College-age and 20-something Christians may be leaving the GOP, but only 5 percent of young evangelicals have joined the Democrats, according to the Pew survey. The other 10 percent are wandering the political wilderness, somewhere between "independent" and "unaffiliated."
Shane Claiborne, a Philadelphia Christian activist and author of "Jesus for President: Politics for Ordinary Radicals," has a different name for these folks: "political misfits."
Claiborne has traveled around the country the past several years, speaking and preaching mostly to college-age Christians who are "both socially conservative and globally aware." That makes them disenchanted with both major parties, he said.
"It's not about liberal or conservative, or Democrats or Republicans," he said. "I don't think it's a new evangelical left. ... There's a new evangelical stuck-in-the-middle."
UW communications professor David Domke said some young evangelicals are breaking with the GOP for the same reasons many people broke from the party in the 2006 legislative elections — the unpopular war in Iraq; the Bush administration's abysmal approval ratings; or, now, because of the tanking economy.
Others broke from the party when John McCain, who hasn't held much appeal for evangelicals in the past, became the presumptive nominee.
The Arizona senator hasn't been a consistent foe of gay marriage, and he supports federally funded embryonic stem-cell research. James Dobson, head of the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family, announced in February that if McCain was the GOP nominee, he'd sit out the election.
But students at a recent bipartisan political union meeting at SPU say there's something more going on with young Christians than disenchantment with McCain.
In an informal poll of the political union, the majority supported Obama.
"I think it's a new movement starting," said Amy Archibald, 19, a sophomore at the evangelical school. "Most of us would never blindly follow the old Christian Right anymore. James Dobson has nothing to do with us. A lot of us are taking apart the issues, and thinking, 'OK, well, [none of the candidates] fits what I'm looking for exactly.' But if you're going to vote, you've got to take your pros with your cons."
Eugene Cho, a founder and lead pastor at Seattle's Quest Church, which caters to a predominantly under-35 crowd, urges young Christians to look beyond the two or three issues that have allowed Christians to be "manipulated by those that know the game or use it as their sole agenda."
"While the issue of abortion — the sanctity of life — must always be a hugely important issue, we must juxtapose that with other issues that are also very important," Cho wrote in his blog on faith and politics.
Polls have shown that young Christians aren't any less concerned about the "family values" issues that have traditionally driven Christians to the Republican camp. (In fact, a study by the Barna Group, an evangelical polling organization, shows young Christians are actually more conservative on abortion than their elders.) It's just that they're also concerned about issues such as social justice and immigration, issues traditionally associated with Democrats.
Judy Naegeli, 25, who works at a Christian philanthropy, says easy access to information about the world via social-networking sites, YouTube and blogs is the reason her generation is more concerned with social justice.
"It's changed our perspective. ... Each generation chooses their cause, and ours is AIDs in Africa, or poverty or social justice," she said.
Tyler Braun, 23, a Portland seminary student who opposes abortion and gay rights, said he'll probably vote for Obama because, since he'd would like to see U.S. troops leave Iraq.
Anika Smith, 23, who works for a think tank in Seattle, said she's concerned with the same issues, but she plans to vote for McCain:
"I'm worried about the war and the economy and social-justice issues. But, the abortion issue is still nonnegotiable."
Nathan Johnson, the executive director of the King County Republican Party, says he is skeptical that young, socially conservative Christians will desert the GOP this fall.
He agrees young Christians appear to be looking beyond the two or three issues — abortion, gay rights, stem-cell research — that have made Christian voters loyal in the past. "But that doesn't mean they're no longer Republican.
"Once the primary is over, and we get into a head-to-head contest, Obama's voting record will come to light," said Johnson, 24. "Then there will be a lot of young conservative voters who won't be able to tolerate what he's stood for in terms of abortion and other socially conservative values."
Young evangelicals are more of a swing constituency than they've been for decades, said Andy Crouch, an editor at Christianity Today, a national evangelical magazine.
"This could turn out to be the election where both parties realize that the evangelical vote is so hopelessly split down the middle that it's not worth courting them at all because what parties need are blocs that can be appealed to en masse," Crouch said. "Paradoxically, evangelicals would become less relevant than ever before."
Braun, the seminary student, said he's not totally committed to any candidate yet.
"I just keep thinking, if Jesus were alive now, he wouldn't necessarily be voting Republican," he said.
By Haley Edwards
JIM BATES / THE SEATTLE TIMES
Michael Dudley is the son of a preacher man.
He's a born-again Christian with two family members in the military. He grew up in the Bible Belt, where almost everyone he knew was Republican. But this fall, he's breaking a handful of stereotypes: He plans to vote for Democrat Barack Obama.
"I think a lot of Christians are having trouble getting behind everything the Republicans stand for," said Dudley, 20, a sophomore at Seattle Pacific University.
Dudley's disenchantment with the GOP isn't unique among young, devoutly Christian voters. According to a September 2007 survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, 15 percent of white evangelicals between 18 and 29, a group traditionally a shoo-in for the GOP, say they no longer identify with the Republican Party. Older evangelicals are also questioning their traditional allegiance, but not at the same rate.
But, Howard Dean, don't count your chickens quite yet. College-age and 20-something Christians may be leaving the GOP, but only 5 percent of young evangelicals have joined the Democrats, according to the Pew survey. The other 10 percent are wandering the political wilderness, somewhere between "independent" and "unaffiliated."
Shane Claiborne, a Philadelphia Christian activist and author of "Jesus for President: Politics for Ordinary Radicals," has a different name for these folks: "political misfits."
Claiborne has traveled around the country the past several years, speaking and preaching mostly to college-age Christians who are "both socially conservative and globally aware." That makes them disenchanted with both major parties, he said.
"It's not about liberal or conservative, or Democrats or Republicans," he said. "I don't think it's a new evangelical left. ... There's a new evangelical stuck-in-the-middle."
UW communications professor David Domke said some young evangelicals are breaking with the GOP for the same reasons many people broke from the party in the 2006 legislative elections — the unpopular war in Iraq; the Bush administration's abysmal approval ratings; or, now, because of the tanking economy.
Others broke from the party when John McCain, who hasn't held much appeal for evangelicals in the past, became the presumptive nominee.
The Arizona senator hasn't been a consistent foe of gay marriage, and he supports federally funded embryonic stem-cell research. James Dobson, head of the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family, announced in February that if McCain was the GOP nominee, he'd sit out the election.
But students at a recent bipartisan political union meeting at SPU say there's something more going on with young Christians than disenchantment with McCain.
In an informal poll of the political union, the majority supported Obama.
"I think it's a new movement starting," said Amy Archibald, 19, a sophomore at the evangelical school. "Most of us would never blindly follow the old Christian Right anymore. James Dobson has nothing to do with us. A lot of us are taking apart the issues, and thinking, 'OK, well, [none of the candidates] fits what I'm looking for exactly.' But if you're going to vote, you've got to take your pros with your cons."
Eugene Cho, a founder and lead pastor at Seattle's Quest Church, which caters to a predominantly under-35 crowd, urges young Christians to look beyond the two or three issues that have allowed Christians to be "manipulated by those that know the game or use it as their sole agenda."
"While the issue of abortion — the sanctity of life — must always be a hugely important issue, we must juxtapose that with other issues that are also very important," Cho wrote in his blog on faith and politics.
Polls have shown that young Christians aren't any less concerned about the "family values" issues that have traditionally driven Christians to the Republican camp. (In fact, a study by the Barna Group, an evangelical polling organization, shows young Christians are actually more conservative on abortion than their elders.) It's just that they're also concerned about issues such as social justice and immigration, issues traditionally associated with Democrats.
Judy Naegeli, 25, who works at a Christian philanthropy, says easy access to information about the world via social-networking sites, YouTube and blogs is the reason her generation is more concerned with social justice.
"It's changed our perspective. ... Each generation chooses their cause, and ours is AIDs in Africa, or poverty or social justice," she said.
Tyler Braun, 23, a Portland seminary student who opposes abortion and gay rights, said he'll probably vote for Obama because, since he'd would like to see U.S. troops leave Iraq.
Anika Smith, 23, who works for a think tank in Seattle, said she's concerned with the same issues, but she plans to vote for McCain:
"I'm worried about the war and the economy and social-justice issues. But, the abortion issue is still nonnegotiable."
Nathan Johnson, the executive director of the King County Republican Party, says he is skeptical that young, socially conservative Christians will desert the GOP this fall.
He agrees young Christians appear to be looking beyond the two or three issues — abortion, gay rights, stem-cell research — that have made Christian voters loyal in the past. "But that doesn't mean they're no longer Republican.
"Once the primary is over, and we get into a head-to-head contest, Obama's voting record will come to light," said Johnson, 24. "Then there will be a lot of young conservative voters who won't be able to tolerate what he's stood for in terms of abortion and other socially conservative values."
Young evangelicals are more of a swing constituency than they've been for decades, said Andy Crouch, an editor at Christianity Today, a national evangelical magazine.
"This could turn out to be the election where both parties realize that the evangelical vote is so hopelessly split down the middle that it's not worth courting them at all because what parties need are blocs that can be appealed to en masse," Crouch said. "Paradoxically, evangelicals would become less relevant than ever before."
Braun, the seminary student, said he's not totally committed to any candidate yet.
"I just keep thinking, if Jesus were alive now, he wouldn't necessarily be voting Republican," he said.
Premium Coverage
I have been watching Chuck Todd this season and can't agree more that this guy is above the rest. He provides non-biased fact and number based assessments. Keep up the good work and let NBC know it.
NBC's Primary Source for Election '08
Chuck Todd Keeps The Numbers Flowing
By Howard Kurtz
NEW YORK -- In a borrowed office at 30 Rock, Chuck Todd is on his cellphone, telling a Barack Obama strategist that his boss will probably fall just short of winning Indiana that night.
"Are you really going to ask for a recount over one delegate?" NBC's political director asks, swiveling in his chair. "It is literally one delegate!"
Less than an hour later, Todd is in front of a bright green wall in Studio 3K, a map of Indiana projected behind him, Hillary Clinton clinging to a fragile lead, when MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann asks: "Did it just end tonight?"
"It may just have ended," Todd says, virtually pronouncing Obama the Democratic nominee at 12:09 a.m. Wednesday.
For political junkies, Todd has become all but inescapable. When he isn't shuttling between studios, he is being invoked as an authority by one anchor or another. After a career out of the limelight, the genial 36-year-old is the campaign season's most improbable TV star.
Every organization has someone like "Chuckie T," as his colleagues call him. He is the brainy guy poring over computer printouts, the number cruncher in the back office. But the voracious appetite of cable news has given him a huge megaphone and an outsize role in shaping coverage of the White House race.
Todd admits to worrying about overexposure, saying: "I don't like going on if I don't feel like I have new information or an interesting way to present the information." But he justifies his ubiquity by noting that audiences drift in and out all day.
When he started at NBC a year ago, Todd felt he was struggling. "The hardest part is to explain the minutiae clearly," he says. "Now I can take the minutiae and make it sound like English for laypeople who haven't been following the DNC delegate rules for 20 years."
Tim Russert, NBC's Washington bureau chief, hired him from the Hotline, the online political digest, telling Todd that beyond his office duties he would get a tryout on "Meet the Press." Apparently Todd passed the audition. "The secret to his success is he understands politics and can explain it," Russert says. "Our platforms are 24/7, and someone has to man the platforms."
Todd is also the point man for dealing with the campaigns. "I think he has emerged as one of the most clear-eyed, honest-dealing pundits in the media," says Obama spokesman Bill Burton. "I have nothing but respect for all of the balls he juggles all day."
Most network political directors labor in obscurity. Few outside the political community knew Todd's predecessor at NBC, Elizabeth Wilner. The most prominent of the bunch was ABC's former political director, Mark Halperin, whom Todd viewed as a model.
On a cable channel packed with such opinionated personalities as Olbermann and Chris Matthews, Todd stands out by not being flamboyant. While others are getting punch-drunk on polls, New York Times critic Alessandra Stanley observed, Todd is "the designated driver of MSNBC's political coverage."
He is accustomed to the role. During his boyhood in Miami, Todd recalls, his conservative father and a liberal cousin often got sloshed and argued about politics.
Todd was 16 when his dad died. Strapped for cash, Todd was accepted by George Washington University on a music scholarship -- he played the French horn -- and pursued a double major in politics.
Longtime friend Andrew Flagel, now George Mason University's dean of admissions, says Todd had phenomenal recall, "whether it had to do with every sports fact you could ever have at your fingertips or every congressional race. He was the Jimmy the Greek of politics. We'd be out at one of the bars in Georgetown or Foggy Bottom and he'd end up with 20 people around us, arguing about either politics or sports, and he's emceeing the discussion."
While in college, Todd worked for the 1992 presidential campaign of Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and later started part time at the Hotline. He left school six credits short of graduation. "It's not the proudest thing on my résumé," he says.
The Hotline, with its exhaustive summaries of stories, polls and punditry, seemed like a perfect fit. "From the very first day," says founder Doug Bailey, "it was obvious this was a guy whose instincts were brilliant. And his work ethic was extraordinary." Bailey recalls telling Todd at an Orioles game a year later: "You're going to run this publication one day, so pay attention."
By 2001, Todd had indeed become editor in chief. A year later he married Kristian Denny, a Democratic consultant who served as communications director for Jim Webb's successful 2006 Senate campaign in Virginia. (Todd says he disclosed the connection on the air and tried to avoid discussing Virginia politics.)
Todd, whose role ranges from suggesting stories for correspondents to overseeing NBC's political blog First Read, excels at cutting through the fog. But on occasion he subscribes to conventional wisdom that turns out to be wrong. The day before the New Hampshire primary, he said on "Hardball" that Obama's "trajectory is still going up," that "everybody's thinking this is going to be a blowout," and that Clinton "is on the cusp of what could be the end of her national political career." Clinton, of course, stunned the pundits by winning New Hampshire.
* * *
It is Tuesday, another primary day, and Todd's first stop is the "Today" show. At 7:13 a.m., he tells Meredith Vieira that the day's voting in Indiana and North Carolina won't have much impact on the delegate count, but "perception's everything." He offers a similar analysis on MSNBC at 7:52 and 9:02.
Matthews leads off "Hardball" at 5 p.m. by saying, "As our political director Chuck Todd put it, this is the last shopping day of the primary season." Todd's theory is that the real action is about to shift from the campaign trail to the superdelegates. On the show, he fields hypothetical questions about what would happen if Obama lost both states. "It would be one of those stomach punches," he says.
Shortly before 6, Todd is briefed on the networks' exit polls. Minutes later he is back in front of the green wall to rehearse with an interactive gizmo, mounted on a tall stand, that enables him to summon maps and graphics and write on them in virtual red ink. "I just tap it? Now, do I pop up Indiana or is Indiana popped up for me?"
At 6:08 Todd does it for real, getting down in the political weeds by rattling off the congressional districts deemed favorable to each candidate. An hour later, wearing a lavalier mike and earpiece that allows him to talk to the producers as he roams the halls, Todd gets into an argument about devoting the next segment to Indiana while ignoring Obama's apparent win in North Carolina. "That's why we get criticized," he says. (The segment is killed when the previous discussion runs long.)
After chatting with Brian Williams for the Mountain Time zone feed of "NBC Nightly News," Todd is back on MSNBC, then on the phone again with the Obama camp. Between swigs of VitaminWater, he is trying to figure out whether the 250,000 votes still uncounted in Indiana are in counties that are Obama strongholds.
"I see nothing out of Lake, nothing out of Porter. . . . You can't call it when you've got nothing out of Gary!"
At 9:18, while Obama is speaking in North Carolina, Todd briefs a producer on the Indiana vote, saying that "if he just wins 55 percent of what's out, he's going to win." Todd later repeats this on the air, writing "55" on his virtual map.
Just before 10 p.m., with Clinton still leading by 6 percentage points, the anchors wonder on the air why Lake County, which includes Gary, hasn't reported yet. "Can we find out, Keith, why we're delayed in getting this vote?" Tom Brokaw asks.
"I will ask Chuck Todd," Olbermann says.
As the night wears on, Todd keeps refining his projection of how much of the Lake County vote Obama needs to upset Clinton. There is also on-air joking with Olbermann about whether MSNBC will call the race at the very moment Todd is on the air explaining that it's too close to call -- which happened during the South Carolina primary and again during Florida. While Todd supervises the political unit, election-night calls are made by polling experts at a separate decision desk.
When Todd delivers his post-midnight conclusion that the Democratic race may have ended, he knows full well the weight of his words. Clinton is close to winning Indiana by 2 percentage points, but the way the media score such things, it is a setback because she was expected to carry the state by a bigger margin. ("Nobody wants to stomp on the grave, but at the same time, reality's reality," he explains off the air.)
When Todd appears at the green wall again at 1:07 a.m., everyone seems a bit punchy. He loosens his yellow tie, asking: "Am I dressed too formally?" Dan Abrams, the late-shift anchor, interrupts Todd to project Clinton the winner in Indiana.
Six hours later, at 7:45 a.m., Todd is back before the cameras. He does "Morning Joe" ("Obama found his voice and put her on the defensive," he says), "Hardball" and "Countdown." "You are unbelievable," Matthews tells him. "I feel like Captain Kirk sometimes and you're Mr. Spock."
While the Obama camp praises Todd, relations have been more strained with top Clinton strategists, who view MSNBC as a blatantly pro-Obama network and have complained about remarks by Matthews and correspondent David Shuster, among others. Clinton aides say Todd is a straight shooter but question his ability to rein in the bigger guns at the network. Todd has told colleagues he is frustrated by the complaints and the perception that MSNBC is biased.
"That's the hardest part of this job," Todd says of fencing with the campaigns. "It's nothing but negative reinforcement: 'You guys are so in the tank for X,' or 'Why are you showing that negative ad 25 times?' "
The job is relentless -- though the Arlington resident, who has two children, still makes time to go to his 4-year-old daughter's soccer games -- but the goateed guru doesn't complain about the demands of television. "I don't want to sound like I'm faking being humble, but I never thought of myself as a TV guy," Todd says. "I just assumed I didn't fit the stereotype."
Meaning? "The looks thing. I've got facial hair -- that's supposed to be a no-no. I've got too many chins."
NBC's Primary Source for Election '08
Chuck Todd Keeps The Numbers Flowing
By Howard Kurtz
NEW YORK -- In a borrowed office at 30 Rock, Chuck Todd is on his cellphone, telling a Barack Obama strategist that his boss will probably fall just short of winning Indiana that night.
"Are you really going to ask for a recount over one delegate?" NBC's political director asks, swiveling in his chair. "It is literally one delegate!"
Less than an hour later, Todd is in front of a bright green wall in Studio 3K, a map of Indiana projected behind him, Hillary Clinton clinging to a fragile lead, when MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann asks: "Did it just end tonight?"
"It may just have ended," Todd says, virtually pronouncing Obama the Democratic nominee at 12:09 a.m. Wednesday.
For political junkies, Todd has become all but inescapable. When he isn't shuttling between studios, he is being invoked as an authority by one anchor or another. After a career out of the limelight, the genial 36-year-old is the campaign season's most improbable TV star.
Every organization has someone like "Chuckie T," as his colleagues call him. He is the brainy guy poring over computer printouts, the number cruncher in the back office. But the voracious appetite of cable news has given him a huge megaphone and an outsize role in shaping coverage of the White House race.
Todd admits to worrying about overexposure, saying: "I don't like going on if I don't feel like I have new information or an interesting way to present the information." But he justifies his ubiquity by noting that audiences drift in and out all day.
When he started at NBC a year ago, Todd felt he was struggling. "The hardest part is to explain the minutiae clearly," he says. "Now I can take the minutiae and make it sound like English for laypeople who haven't been following the DNC delegate rules for 20 years."
Tim Russert, NBC's Washington bureau chief, hired him from the Hotline, the online political digest, telling Todd that beyond his office duties he would get a tryout on "Meet the Press." Apparently Todd passed the audition. "The secret to his success is he understands politics and can explain it," Russert says. "Our platforms are 24/7, and someone has to man the platforms."
Todd is also the point man for dealing with the campaigns. "I think he has emerged as one of the most clear-eyed, honest-dealing pundits in the media," says Obama spokesman Bill Burton. "I have nothing but respect for all of the balls he juggles all day."
Most network political directors labor in obscurity. Few outside the political community knew Todd's predecessor at NBC, Elizabeth Wilner. The most prominent of the bunch was ABC's former political director, Mark Halperin, whom Todd viewed as a model.
On a cable channel packed with such opinionated personalities as Olbermann and Chris Matthews, Todd stands out by not being flamboyant. While others are getting punch-drunk on polls, New York Times critic Alessandra Stanley observed, Todd is "the designated driver of MSNBC's political coverage."
He is accustomed to the role. During his boyhood in Miami, Todd recalls, his conservative father and a liberal cousin often got sloshed and argued about politics.
Todd was 16 when his dad died. Strapped for cash, Todd was accepted by George Washington University on a music scholarship -- he played the French horn -- and pursued a double major in politics.
Longtime friend Andrew Flagel, now George Mason University's dean of admissions, says Todd had phenomenal recall, "whether it had to do with every sports fact you could ever have at your fingertips or every congressional race. He was the Jimmy the Greek of politics. We'd be out at one of the bars in Georgetown or Foggy Bottom and he'd end up with 20 people around us, arguing about either politics or sports, and he's emceeing the discussion."
While in college, Todd worked for the 1992 presidential campaign of Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and later started part time at the Hotline. He left school six credits short of graduation. "It's not the proudest thing on my résumé," he says.
The Hotline, with its exhaustive summaries of stories, polls and punditry, seemed like a perfect fit. "From the very first day," says founder Doug Bailey, "it was obvious this was a guy whose instincts were brilliant. And his work ethic was extraordinary." Bailey recalls telling Todd at an Orioles game a year later: "You're going to run this publication one day, so pay attention."
By 2001, Todd had indeed become editor in chief. A year later he married Kristian Denny, a Democratic consultant who served as communications director for Jim Webb's successful 2006 Senate campaign in Virginia. (Todd says he disclosed the connection on the air and tried to avoid discussing Virginia politics.)
Todd, whose role ranges from suggesting stories for correspondents to overseeing NBC's political blog First Read, excels at cutting through the fog. But on occasion he subscribes to conventional wisdom that turns out to be wrong. The day before the New Hampshire primary, he said on "Hardball" that Obama's "trajectory is still going up," that "everybody's thinking this is going to be a blowout," and that Clinton "is on the cusp of what could be the end of her national political career." Clinton, of course, stunned the pundits by winning New Hampshire.
* * *
It is Tuesday, another primary day, and Todd's first stop is the "Today" show. At 7:13 a.m., he tells Meredith Vieira that the day's voting in Indiana and North Carolina won't have much impact on the delegate count, but "perception's everything." He offers a similar analysis on MSNBC at 7:52 and 9:02.
Matthews leads off "Hardball" at 5 p.m. by saying, "As our political director Chuck Todd put it, this is the last shopping day of the primary season." Todd's theory is that the real action is about to shift from the campaign trail to the superdelegates. On the show, he fields hypothetical questions about what would happen if Obama lost both states. "It would be one of those stomach punches," he says.
Shortly before 6, Todd is briefed on the networks' exit polls. Minutes later he is back in front of the green wall to rehearse with an interactive gizmo, mounted on a tall stand, that enables him to summon maps and graphics and write on them in virtual red ink. "I just tap it? Now, do I pop up Indiana or is Indiana popped up for me?"
At 6:08 Todd does it for real, getting down in the political weeds by rattling off the congressional districts deemed favorable to each candidate. An hour later, wearing a lavalier mike and earpiece that allows him to talk to the producers as he roams the halls, Todd gets into an argument about devoting the next segment to Indiana while ignoring Obama's apparent win in North Carolina. "That's why we get criticized," he says. (The segment is killed when the previous discussion runs long.)
After chatting with Brian Williams for the Mountain Time zone feed of "NBC Nightly News," Todd is back on MSNBC, then on the phone again with the Obama camp. Between swigs of VitaminWater, he is trying to figure out whether the 250,000 votes still uncounted in Indiana are in counties that are Obama strongholds.
"I see nothing out of Lake, nothing out of Porter. . . . You can't call it when you've got nothing out of Gary!"
At 9:18, while Obama is speaking in North Carolina, Todd briefs a producer on the Indiana vote, saying that "if he just wins 55 percent of what's out, he's going to win." Todd later repeats this on the air, writing "55" on his virtual map.
Just before 10 p.m., with Clinton still leading by 6 percentage points, the anchors wonder on the air why Lake County, which includes Gary, hasn't reported yet. "Can we find out, Keith, why we're delayed in getting this vote?" Tom Brokaw asks.
"I will ask Chuck Todd," Olbermann says.
As the night wears on, Todd keeps refining his projection of how much of the Lake County vote Obama needs to upset Clinton. There is also on-air joking with Olbermann about whether MSNBC will call the race at the very moment Todd is on the air explaining that it's too close to call -- which happened during the South Carolina primary and again during Florida. While Todd supervises the political unit, election-night calls are made by polling experts at a separate decision desk.
When Todd delivers his post-midnight conclusion that the Democratic race may have ended, he knows full well the weight of his words. Clinton is close to winning Indiana by 2 percentage points, but the way the media score such things, it is a setback because she was expected to carry the state by a bigger margin. ("Nobody wants to stomp on the grave, but at the same time, reality's reality," he explains off the air.)
When Todd appears at the green wall again at 1:07 a.m., everyone seems a bit punchy. He loosens his yellow tie, asking: "Am I dressed too formally?" Dan Abrams, the late-shift anchor, interrupts Todd to project Clinton the winner in Indiana.
Six hours later, at 7:45 a.m., Todd is back before the cameras. He does "Morning Joe" ("Obama found his voice and put her on the defensive," he says), "Hardball" and "Countdown." "You are unbelievable," Matthews tells him. "I feel like Captain Kirk sometimes and you're Mr. Spock."
While the Obama camp praises Todd, relations have been more strained with top Clinton strategists, who view MSNBC as a blatantly pro-Obama network and have complained about remarks by Matthews and correspondent David Shuster, among others. Clinton aides say Todd is a straight shooter but question his ability to rein in the bigger guns at the network. Todd has told colleagues he is frustrated by the complaints and the perception that MSNBC is biased.
"That's the hardest part of this job," Todd says of fencing with the campaigns. "It's nothing but negative reinforcement: 'You guys are so in the tank for X,' or 'Why are you showing that negative ad 25 times?' "
The job is relentless -- though the Arlington resident, who has two children, still makes time to go to his 4-year-old daughter's soccer games -- but the goateed guru doesn't complain about the demands of television. "I don't want to sound like I'm faking being humble, but I never thought of myself as a TV guy," Todd says. "I just assumed I didn't fit the stereotype."
Meaning? "The looks thing. I've got facial hair -- that's supposed to be a no-no. I've got too many chins."
Sunday, May 11, 2008
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