PBS All-American Presidential Forums

As might have been expected, last night’s “All-American Presidential Forum” featuring Repubican candidates for president talking to black journalists at a historically black college talking about issues of special interest to black Americans turned into a black comedy. The focus was mostly on the candidates who didn’t show — which is to say, all of them who might conceivably get elected president — and those who did show exemplified Kris Kristopherson’s adage, “Freedom is another word for nothing left to lose.

The Swamp’s Mark Silva recaps the opener:

At the debate for Republicans at a historically black college campus in Maryland tonight — the debate that all of the leading Republican candidates for president snubbed — radio personality Tom Joyner offered a special welcome to the “home viewing audience” from the stage: Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, John McCain and Fred Thomspon. “You know I had to call them out,” said Joyner. Empty podiums were left for the party’s front-runners.

“Enough said of the no-shows,” said host Tavis Smiley, a PBS television and public radio talk show host and moderator of the debate at Morgan State University. Here are the shows: Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas, Rep. Duncan Hunter of California, Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado, and former ambassador Alan Keyes of Maryland, reprising his 2000 campaign.

“I wish all of the candidates had come,” Huckabee said.

“The main reason I’m here is I was invited,” Paul said.

“I apologize for all the candidates who are not here,” said Brownback. “I think it’s a disgrace that they are not here… What they are doing is sending a message of narrowing the base.

“I’m sorry,” Brownback said. “A lot of people on the Republican side say we can’t get votes from the African American community,” he told the audience. “Why don’t you pick one of the primary states, register voters… and then vote for one of the six of us.”

The Media Bloggers Association, of which I’m a board member, credentialed over 40 bloggers to attend the event and cover it live. The chance to see Mike Huckabee and Alan Keyes, however, didn’t provide adequate motivation for fighting rush hour traffic to Baltimore and driving back from Baltimore in the middle of the night when I had to get up early for work the next day. By all indications, I made the right call. Those who stuck it out have their posts on the event aggregated here.

Ken Layne live blogged it for Wonkette, paraphrasing liberally. HuffPo’s Rachel Sklar plays the dialog straight, interjecting liberally.

Ian Schwartz notes that there was a minor bit of actual news: Ron Paul has pledged not to run as a 3rd party candidate when he doesn’t get the nomination.

American Taíno hands out report cards, with Mike Huckabee coming out as valedictorian with an A- and Alan Keyes barely graduating with a D.

Casey Lartigue is amused that Sam Brownback felt the need to announce he’d been to jail as a means of pandering to black people.

LaShawn Barber correctly guesses that the event will be “boring” and seems more interested in the other bloggers than in the candidates. Given they all have essentially the same chances of being elected president and the guys on stage won’t give out any link love, that’s probably a good call.

Eric Scheie attempts to transcribe the event, including audience reactions. His conclusion:

My feeling is that Huckabee did the best job. His sincerity was obvious, and he was very articulate as he spoke from the heart. Brownback came in second, and the rest, well, Hunter was sorta OK (although his pornography remark sounded almost bizarre), as was Tancredo, while Keyes and Paul sounded desperate and shrill. (I thought Keyes would be a little more articulate and reasoned, but he sounded almost defensive, and really seemed to be yelling.)

That Huckabee was the winner appears to be the early consensus. Will this give him an additional boomlet to go along with his strong showing in the meaningless Aimes straw poll? Perhaps. Enough to matter? Methinks not.

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National Public Radio turned down an offer by President Bush to sit down with correspondent Juan Williams to talk about race issues, saying they would not allow him to pick the interviewer.

The White House reached out to National Public Radio over the weekend, offering analyst Juan Williams a presidential interview to mark yesterday’s 50th anniversary of school desegregation in Little Rock. But NPR turned down the interview, and Williams’s talk with Bush wound up in a very different media venue: Fox News.

Williams said yesterday he was “stunned” by NPR’s decision. “It makes no sense to me. President Bush has never given an interview in which he focused on race. . . . I was stunned by the decision to turn their backs on him and to turn their backs on me.”

Ellen Weiss, NPR’s vice president for news, said she “felt strongly” that “the White House shouldn’t be selecting the person.” She said NPR told Bush’s press secretary, Dana Perino, that “we’re grateful for the opportunity to talk to the president but we wanted to determine who did the interview.” When the White House said the offer could not be transferred to one of NPR’s program hosts, Weiss took a pass.

Perino said she called Williams with the offer Saturday because of the Little Rock anniversary and the racial controversy over charges of excessive prosecution in Jena, La. “We thought this would be a good opportunity for the president to sit down with someone and have a broader conversation about race relations,” Perino said. “The president has talked with Juan before and we know him well. He’s active in trying to keep good relations with us. . . . We could have done a print interview, but I felt I wanted people to hear the president’s voice.”

While it’s true that this president seems to have an especial penchant for choosing only venues within his comfort zone, presidents chose their hosts all the time. Bill Clinton, probably the best on his feet communicator of any president in my lifetime, granted exclusive interviews to the likes of Larry King, knowing he’d get softer treatment than with other hosts.

And, despite his association with Fox News, Williams is hardly a conservative shill. He’s a highly regarded left-of-center moderate with decades of experience.

Williams is a one-time Washington Post reporter and editorial writer who has written such books as “Eyes on the Prize,” about the civil rights movement. In a Post op-ed column on Little Rock yesterday, he criticized a recent Supreme Court decision striking down two voluntary school integration plans as contributing to the isolation of poor and minority students.

Williams, who is sometimes criticized by liberal groups, dismissed the notion that he was picked as a sympathetic interviewer, saying he often challenges the administration on “Fox News Sunday.”

“I had worked at NPR’s direction to develop a relationship with the White House,” he said. “I have an expertise on race relations. . . . I thought the listeners of NPR lost a tremendous opportunity to hear the president in a rare interview on a very important subject.”

It’s especially the case in light of the recent controversy over Republican presidential candidates ducking debates on race relations. Does NPR really think one of their other hosts would have asked more insightful questions on the topic than Williams?

via Memeorandum

UPDATE: For some perspective, see these stories about how GQ pulled a critical story on Hillary Clinton after being blackmailed by Bill Clinton.

Clintons persuade GQ to pull critical article

The planned article included details of in-fighting within her tightly-controlled campaign and internal criticism of her campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle.

When Mr Green discussed the article with a senior Clinton press aide, the campaign moved swiftly. Clinton advisers told GQ that if the Green article was published they would withdraw cooperation over a piece by George Saunders, a novelist and GQ writer, who travelled with Mr Clinton to Africa in July. Mr Saunders is seen as more favourably disposed to the Clinton camp. This year, he told a New York newspaper that he had twice voted for Mr Clinton and that “everybody likes him and knows him, so he can get people in a room and make things happen”.

Mr Clinton is expected to appear on the cover of the December issue of GQ with the Saunders article inside. The magazine usually names a Man of the Year in that issue and Mr Clinton is understood to be in the running.

Clinton campaign kills negative story

Despite internal protests, GQ editor Jim Nelson met the Clinton campaign’s demands, which had been delivered by Bill Clinton’s spokesman, Jay Carson, several sources familiar with the conversations said. GQ writer George Saunders traveled with Clinton to Africa in July, and Clinton is slated to appear on the cover of GQ’s December issue, in which it traditionally names a “Man of the Year,” according magazine industry sources. And the offending article by Atlantic Monthly staff writer Josh Green got the spike.
[…]

The spiked GQ story also shows how the Clinton campaign has been able to use its access to the most important commodity in media — celebrity, and in fact two bona fide celebrities — to shape not just what gets written about the candidate, but also what doesn’t.

There’s nothing unusual about providing extra access to candidates to reporters seen as sympathetic, and cutting off those seen as hostile to a campaign. The 2004 Bush campaign banned a New York Times reporter from Vice President Dick Cheney’s jet, and Sen. Barack Obama threatened to bar Fox News reporters from campaign travel. But a retreat of the sort GQ is alleged to have made is unusual, particularly as part of what sources described as a barely veiled transaction of editorial leverage for access.

The Clinton campaign is unique in its ability to provide cash value to the media, and particularly the celebrity-driven precincts of television and magazines. Bill Clinton is a favorite cover figure, because his face is viewed within the magazine industry as one that can move product. (Indeed, Green’s own magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, ran as its October cover story “Bill Clinton’s campaign to save the world.”)

It’s a fact that gives the Clintons’ press aides a leverage more familiar to Hollywood publicists than even to her political rivals — less Mitt Romney and more Tom Cruise, whose publicists once required interviewers to sign a statement pledging not to write anything “derogatory” about the star.

The Clinton campaign has more sway with television networks than any rival. At the time Clinton launched her campaign, the networks’ hunger for interviews had her all over the morning and evening news broadcasts of every network — after her aides negotiated agreements limiting producers’ abilities to edit the interviews.

Now, NPR isn’t GQ or the Big 3 television networks. But the idea that it’s somehow unusual for a sitting president to set terms and conditions for his interviews — and have them granted — is rather silly.

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Robert Cox, president of the Media Bloggers Association, has an editorial in today’s Washington Examiner excoriating the top Republicans for skipping the PBS debates with Tavis Smiley on issues of special importance to “people of color”.

This is not only a strategic mistake for these campaigns but also a major embarrassment for the Republican Party.

How can voters take seriously a candidate asking for their support to be leader of the free world when that same candidate is unwilling to take questions from black journalists, in front of a predominantly black audience?

The absence of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Sen. John McCain of Arizona and former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson from what has been, so far, the only nationally televised debate to focus solely on topics of interest of black Americans sends a very clear message that not only is the Republican Party not interested in courting the “black vote” but is not even willing to engage on issues of importance to African-Americans.

This goes beyond any one campaign. It is nothing less than a disgrace for the entire country. Is it any wonder that when Kanye West blurts out “President Bush hates black people” on national television that many black Americans nod their heads in agreement?

Newt Gingrich agrees:

“I’m puzzled by their decision. I can’t speak for them. I think it’s a mistake. I wish they would change their minds — they still have a few days — and I wish they would in fact go to the debate Thursday night,” said Gingrich, who is considering entering the race for the GOP nomination.

The top four candidates in the GOP race — former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson, Arizona Sen. John McCain and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney — all declined to participate in the forum citing scheduling conflicts and fundraising pressures. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and other longshot GOP candidates who have agreed to participate “deserve some praise for showing up and for carrying the message,” Gingrich said.

“I think Republicans could have, if they had the nerve to do it, a tremendous message,” Gingrich said. “There are a lot of good cases to be made that the African-American community has been hurt more by the failures of government than any other community.”

Like President Bush routinely snubbing the NAACP convention, this action undoubtedly reinforces the preexisting stereotypes about the Republican Party. On the other hand, it’s far from clear that showing up at these debates will do much to change those preconceptions. With the black leadership fully in the pocket of the Democratic Party and willing to run vicious smear attacks against Republican candidates, it’s not hard to see why the GOP frontrunners made the cost-benefit calculation they did.

That said, there’s something to the notion of at least making the effort to reach out. My guess is that doing so would have essentially no impact on the percentage of blacks voters choosing the Republican candidate next November. It might, though, help at the margins of dispelling the silly notion that Republicans don’t care about black people. Taking the opportunity to address these concerns head on, emphasizing that, contrary to John Edwards’ sales pitch, we’re all part of one America couldn’t hurt.

Regardless, citing “scheduling conflicts” is a rather lame way of excusing these snubs. The Democratic candidates all managed to fit it into their schedule with far less advanced notice; indeed, this date was selected after agreement of all the major Republican candidates (except perhaps Thompson, who wasn’t officially in the race at the time). It would have been far better to take the stand that they’re only going to debate American issues, not “hypenated American” issues. Simply rejecting the whole notion of segmenting the debates as if there are presidents of Gay America or Black America or White America would have been a far more courageous position — and one consistent with Republican principles.

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Steve Benen reports that all four of the top contenders for the Republican nomination were no-shows at the “Values Voter Debate” sponsored by WorldNetDaily founder Joseph Farah and attended by several top Christian Conservative luminaries. The most interesting comment of the night (or, at least the most interesting in Steve’s post about the night):

Religious right leader Janet Folger was unrestrained in threatening those who neglected to participate in the debate. To those who “had something more important to do than talk to those of us who represent God’s principles,” Folger had a prediction: “Those who snubbed us, they will not win…. They will regret the decision.”

What that says about the power of the social conservative leadership and the calculations of the candidates is open to interpretation. While Steve’s suggestion that this is evidence of the decline of the movement, I’d note this comes right on the heels of the same candidates blowing off Tavis Smiley’s PBS forum directed at black voters.

Maybe the real lesson is that the top tier Republicans are incredibly risk averse? They may well have calculated that going to any debate that’s hosted by or aimed at a particular niche demographic is dangerous. Or, perhaps they’ve just decided that debating, period, is a poor use of their time at this stage of the campaign.

Conversely, the Democrats same to be game for debating anywhere at any time, having shown up for debates for gays, blacks, and others. [Commenter Wayne observes, “Except for Fox News.” True that.] The extent to which this means they’re more confident or simply reflects the nature of their coalition is hard to say.

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