With the inauguration of David Paterson as New York's new Governor set to take place at 1 PM EST, I have some thoughts on how he's being set up to succeed, or to fail, by the traditional media. There are several frames being developed by him and the traditional media in which New Yorkers will start off in their judgment of Paterson over these next few months. I discuss four frames being set up, and the implications of each for progressives in the wake of Eliot Spitzer, in the extended entry.
I've been tracing the controversy in New York state where a bunch of insiders, movement right-wingers, and corrupt Republicans are trying to cripple an emerging progressive star, Eliot Spitzer. After a few weeks of bad publicity, it seems to be turning around for Spitzer because state Senate Republican leader Joe Bruno is obviously acting in bad faith.
Today, liberal Congressman Jerry Nadler has come to bat for Spitzer, analogizing this scandal to Whitewater, a whole lot of muck dredged up to stop someone's political traction and overturn a popular electoral result. It's important to track fights like this, because the 'kill them in the crib' strategy is on display where the right tries to take down a hero of ours. Nadler talks both about that, and about what Spitzer is getting done as Governor. Spitzer's been a bit short on local allies, so this is a big and good step forward for him, as Nadler carries a lot of credibility.
Ugh, I hate dealing with stupid and clumsy smear campaigns, but it's got to be done. This ignorant article is being circulated among right-wing bloggers purporting to find deep questions about Spitzer's campaign operation.
Just since the first of this year, Spitzer 2010 has taken in $5.6 million and spent $4.2 million on a campaign that doesn't officially start for at least two years. Among the largest reported Spitzer 2010 expenditures to date are payments totaling $3,161,112 to Global Strategy Group, a media consultant group, for "TV ads."
The wingnuts are asking why, if Spitzer is up for reelection in 2010, would he be collecting money this early. The answer takes a passing familiarity with New York politics; Spitzer spent $3 million plus in an ad war with SEIU over health care plans. The wingnutosphere has woken up and finally started grabbing onto the toenail clippings of this scandal, milking every last headline in what is rapidly becoming a show trial. Meanwhile, Spitzer keeps doing stuff like allocating more money for affordable housing and working to enroll more kids in the health plus program. Ack, these right-wing freaks are just awful.
Meanwhile, the wingnuts are also out to get the New York Times's excellent Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse, concocting a fake scandal about her not wanting to appear on C-Span. This one's much stupider than the Spitzer smear. Spitzer's problems are at least a result of his administration's own mistakes, both ethical and political. This is just Linda Greenhouse not being told that C-Span was going to film a panel, and when she arrived at that panel, saying she would not be as comfortable expressing herself to a nationally televised audience as an intimate group of journalism professors. That's literally the 'controversy'. Slate has a rundown, as does the AEJMC forum.
I know and like Greenhouse and I like her reporting. She's accurate and passionate, which is probably why the right is going after her. Anyway, it's just important to get it on the record that she's being unfairly attacked.
Again, right-wing smear campaigns are really really irritating, often because the accusations are so stupid as to make them hard to rebut. You mean there was a controversy about C-Span cameras? No, there had to be more, right? No, in fact, there is nothing else here, except a right-wing witchhunt. Ack, these people are just freaks.
What's been going on for weeks in New York state is part of the standard conservative 'kill them in the crib' strategy of destroying progressive icons and politicians. In this case, the target is rising progressive star Eliot Spitzer. Spitzer is considered especially dangerous to the right-wing, because he's a real populist who has taken on Wall Street in extremely high profile cases. He was so effective that a few years ago, the corrupt US Chamber of Commerce declared a 'war on Spitzerism' to reign in state attorney general officers that sought to aggressively enforce the law against corporate elites. The scandal that's taking place now, while ostensibly caused by Spitzer's mistakes, has more to do with these established enemies of populism combined with a peculiar set of incentives for local politicians and insider journalists in New York to pile on an anti-Spitzer frenzy.
Anyway, what happened today is that the Republicans themselves in the state Senate publicly investigated the behavior of the Spitzer administration, even though nonpartisan agencies with more credibility are already looking into what happened. There is no reason for state Senate leader Joe Bruno to be doing this except vengeance and the desire to drag out a scandal and prevent an investigation of Bruno's own corruption, as Rochester Turning notes (though perhaps Bruno just loves the attention, having preened around on national TV for days now).
Meanwhile, New Yorkers and leaders in the state are beginning to ask the government to, well, get back to work. Stuart Appelbaum, of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, is asking the state Senate to pass paid family leave and expand access to health care instead of engaging in these investigations. Both policies are Spitzer priorities. Spitzer himself is actually still governing, working to review and fix New York City's subway system that broke down simply due to thunderstorms. As the Cunning Realist put it, the 'Bloomberg is off the rose'. Having progressives govern makes a difference; years of Giuliani and Bloomberg in the Mayoral seat has of course led to decaying infrastructure, because cross-dressers or not, they are Republicans and Republicans cannot govern.
Many of us have become jaded by a lack of accountability by our politicians at the top, and so the notion that 'getting something done' should take precedence over grandstanding investigations sounds like spin. But in this case, it's not. Every day, I get an email from Michael Caputo of NYFacts.net bashing Eliot Spitzer, and Caputo is a former aide to George H.W. Bush, well-established in right-wing orbits, and obviously directing a smear campaign.
This is really a collection of insiders, press people, angry coddled legislators, Joe Bruno and right-wingers trying to destroy Eliot Spitzer's capacity to govern New York. They tried it with Deval Patrick in Massachusetts and Jon Corzine in New Jersey, and they'll try it with every progressive who takes on a political machine. In some ways, this is exactly what the right did in impeaching Bill Clinton, using Clinton's sloppiness and mistakes to try to overturn a popular electoral result. Destroying progressives is what the right does well, and it's in fact the only thing the right does well. This time, it's not going to work, since there are already investigations going on that are not grounded in Republican partisanship, the scandal has been on every paper in the state for weeks, and yet Spitzer is still pretty popular.
More than that, the public is paying attention and isn't falling for it. They are seeing, with the collapse of infrastructure in Minnesota and New York City, that people in government actually do have stuff to do.
I've been following the Spitzer nonsense in New York. Basically, Spitzer made a mistake, took a hit in the polls to a 48-28 approval rating (as if that's bad), but his archenemy Joe Bruno is immensely unpopular, at 33-40 approve/disapprove.
The state Senate Republicans are going to hold a hearing today to dig into Spitzer, so we'll see how aggressively Bruno goes out. Bruno's been all over the national news and the talk shows, so I can't imagine he'll be conciliatory. Nevertheless, he should be. He's deeply corrupt, and voters know it. He effectively hurt Spitzer, but he should beware of overreeach.
Despite the hyperventilating press, voters can see where the problem lies: 'Voters are more certain, 43 - 26 percent with 30 percent undecided, that further investigation will show Bruno did something wrong.'
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