Wallwritings

Update: Thursday, February 19:

Tom Geoghegan has just been endorsed in the Fifth District Democratic primary by Democrats for America (DFA).  

By James M. Wall                                  

At last count, 14 candidates are competing in the special March 3 Democratic primary to fill Rahm Emanuel’s Illinois 5th Congressional District seat. There will be an April 7 General Election, but this is Chicago, so the primary will pick the next congressman from the Fifth.

Don Rose, veteran independent political operative and columnist, describes the district in a recent Chicago Sun Times column:

The 5th is the second-toughest Machine-controlled Democratic congressional district in Chicago. It differs slightly from the conservative 3rd District because of a handful of independent-liberal lakefront precincts comprising 18 percent of the vote. 

Rose knows the territory. His reform credentials date back to the days of Harold Washington. Over the years, he has not endeared himself to the Machine, which is more formally known as the Cook County Democratic Central Committee whose ward committeemen members are closely aligned with Chicago’s mayor, a position held by Richard J. Daley for 21 years and now by his son, Richard M. Daley, first elected in 1989.

High profile congressmen from the Fifth have included Dan Rostenkowski, who served the district for 36 years before his imprisonment on fraud charges, and Rod Blagojevich, who stopped by the district long enough to become governor before he crashed and burned. 

Rahm Emanuel held the seat between two stints in the White House, first with Bill Clinton, and now as Barack Obama’s Chief of Staff. Emanuel also managed to shoe horn in two years out of politics in the world of financial deal making, during which time he built a $18 million personal kitty and an enhanced rolodex, both of which were assets in his successful run to become Blagojevich’s successor.

There are only two weeks left until the March 3 primary.  The three leading Democratic candidates are the “usual suspects” in Chicago Democratic primaries, two state representatives, Sara Feigenholtz and John Fritchey, and one Cook County Commissioner, Mike Quigley. Two other candidates identified by Don Rose as “legacy” candidates, are sons of former heavyweight Chicago office holders.

Emanuel entered his initial race for the district with the Machine’s blessing. The Machine has not formally endorsed a candidate in the current race. State Representative John Fritchey, an attorney who is a ward committeeman, barely missed winning a formal endorsement from the Cook County Central Committee.

Last weekend I was invited by the progressive Greater Chicago Caucus (GCC) to moderate two forums for 5th district candidates.  Neither the “usual suspects” nor the “legacy” candidates attended my forums (though County Commissioner Mike Quigley did attend a third GCC forum). The candidates I met were impressive. However, they are little known to the voters, a serious handicap in such a short campaign.

With one exception: Tom Geoghegan (pronounced gay-gan), a labor lawyer who is the author of several significant books and a frequent contributor to national publications and websites. He is well known in local and national labor circles. 

(Geoghegan’s website includes a video of all the candidates meeting with the Chicago Tribune editorial board. 

In early January, James Fallows, National Correspondent for the Atlantic magazine, wrote:

Two years ago, I said I was making an exception to the “no active involvement in politics” stance I had maintained through my previous decades of journalistic life. (After leaving a one-time stint in politics in the Jimmy Carter years.) That exception was to support my friend Jim Webb’s then-improbable run for the U.S. Senate from Virginia.

Here is exception number two: Tom Geoghegan for Congress. He will be running in the special election for the seat Rahm Emanuel is vacating to become White House chief of staff.

Fallows notes that “to the extent Tom is known publicly, it’s mainly because of  books he has written, like Which Side Are You On?, The Secret Lives of Citizens, and In America’s Courts.”

Fallows’ enthusiasm for his long time friend, however, is not based entirely on his books:

Day by day for several decades he has been a lawyer in a small Chicago law firm representing steel workers, truckers, nurses, and other employees whose travails are the reality covered by abstractions like “the polarization of America” and “the disappearing middle class.”

Geoghegan’s skills as a writer and an intellectual are assets but in themselves might not recommend him for a Congressional job. His consistent and canny record of organizing, representing, and defending people who are the natural Democratic (and American) base is the relevant point.

Intrigued by Geoghegan, after hearing him twice in the forums I moderated, and a third time in a larger forum that included most of the 14 candidates running, I looked further into Geoghegan’s writing and legal career.

His most recent book is now out in paperback, See You in Court: How the Right Made America a Lawsuit Nation. He treats a theme which suggests he could be a voice for the voiceless in a country struggling to see daylight after eight years of conservative darkness.

Chicago blogger Rick Perlstein describes Geoghegan’s career in a Facebook cntry:

. . . As a lawyer [Geoghegan] has successfully brought class actions to recover lost pension benefits and health insurance arising from plant closings. He has also recovered shut down benefits under the federal WARN Act in several major cases. Both in federal court and in arbitrations, he has represented many different local unions, including nurses, truck drivers, steelworkers and railroad workers.

David Sirota, of The Huffington Post, is enthusiastic about Geoghegan;

One of the greatest living progressives in America . . . The reason his writing is so good is because he’s so simultaneously brilliant, progressive and politically savvy – all skills that would make him a congressional powerhouse.

After several interviews with the candidates, and four public forums, Geoghegan received the endorsement of the Greater Chicago Caucus, which cited “Geoghegan’s leadership on economic and social justice issues as the primary reason behind the endorsement.”

GCC has worked in several previous congressional campaigns. The organization has a strong base of volunteers and financial supporters among progressive communities in Chicago. 

The GCC web site describes the Caucus as ” a membership organization consisting of diverse communities with a shared commitment to peace and social justice.”  In addition to the GCC endorsement, Geoghegan has been endorsed by Teamsters Local 743, Progressive Democrats of America, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC), and Students for a New American Politics PAC. 

Don Rose gives his rationale for supporting Geoghegan after going through the scorecard of candidates better known to voters:

State Rep. Fritchey, who also is 32nd Ward committeeman, is one of three leading candidates, along with state Rep. Sara Feigenholtz. A sliver of her district is in the 5th. She is permitted to vote a liberal/feminist line in accord with her constituency, but otherwise requires surgical removal from House Speaker Mike Madigan. . . . 

The third leading candidate is County Commissioner Mike Quigley, known as a genuine reformer on the [Cook] County Board. His campaign seems to be based on being more against Board President Todd Stroger than anyone on the planet — or at least any of the 14 candidates running.

Rose feels Quigley could be a good choice, except for the fact that as a reformer he prefers to have Quigley, a fellow reformer, remain on the County board.

Rose concludes:

As a resident, my vote goes to labor lawyer Tom Geoghegan, author of several important books. His law partner is former Ald. Leon M. Despres, a father of progressive reform in Chicago, which speaks volumes in itself.

My reading of the race is that Rep. Sara Feigenholtz is the favorite. She is well ahead in the  money race, while Fritchey, her colleague in the legislature, is running a close second, not in money but in Machine backing.

One problem Feigenholtz might encounter is that in addition to the fact that her state district is in only a small part of the 5th congressional district, she could lose votes to the other female candidate, a very promising newcomer to politics, Jan Donetelli, who is on leave from her job as a Delta Airline pilot, a position she took after a career as a Navy pilot. 

Don Rose, adopting the customary suspicion of a Chicago reformer, suggests Donetelli may be a “plant” to dilute the female vote away from Feigenholtz. Planted by whom?  Some election watchers suspect Rahm Emanuel may one day grow weary of White House pressures and decide to take back his old seat. Does he have a “seat holder” among the 14 candidates who would benefit from Rahm’s fund-raising prowess and White House connections?  

Could that “seat holder” be Donetelli? Emanuel has a fondness for recruiting military veterans like Donetelli to run for Democratic seats. But Rahm’s choice would have to be reliable on Israel, which would suggest he would prefer Feigenholtz, whose website language on Israel follows the Emanuel line.

But would Feigenholtz give up a safe state house seat if she believes she would have to give her new congressional seat back to Rahm? Not likely; Feigenholtz is relatively young and ambitious.  She is not ready to retire.

Donetelli also does not appear to be either a plant or a place-holder. Her views on the Middle East do not reach the rhetorical intensity that Rahm admires. Nor, for that matter, is it even certain that Rahm wants to come back. His power in the White House, based on his first month in the Obama era, presumably will only grow stronger.  Hard to keep ’em down in the district, after they’ve seen DC. . .  from the top. 

I see the race as Feigenholtz’ to lose. But I also have a strong hunch that on a ballot with 14 Democratic candidates, progressive labor lawyer Tom Geoghegan might emerge as the upset winner.

To pull that off, progressive voters and progressive supporters from around the country will have to play a major role. Geoghegan already has received strong support from national progressive columnists in publications like the Wall Street Journal, the Nation and the New Yorker.  But he needs more than praise from the progressive left.  He needs an aggressive progressive movement which the intellectual left has thus far failed to generate.

 John B. Judis points to the absence of a progressive movement as one reason President Obama’s stimulus package was weakened by the Republican minority in Congress. 

. . . there is not a popular left movement that is agitating for him to go well beyond where he would even ideally like to go. Sure, there are left wing intellectuals like Paul Krugman who are beating the drums for nationalizing the banks and for a $1 trillion-plus stimulus. But I am not referring to intellectuals, but to movements that stir up trouble among voters and get people really angry. . .

Howard Beale had the right idea. In the 1976 movie Network, Beale (Peter Finch) told his television audience to get out of their chairs, go to the window, open it, and shout: “I’m as mad as hell and I am not going to take it anymore!”  There are fourteen names on the Illinois Fifth district March 3 ballot.  Only one of them is a bona fide progressive. His name is Tom Geoghegan, another tall, thin Illinois attorney with a law degree from Harvard. Pass it on.

by James M. Wall

Update on Sam Stein of Huffington Post,  Below:

It was yet another sign that the Bush years are over when 48 minutes into his first White House presidential press conference, President Obama turned to Helen Thomas, who, at least for the moment, is back on the White House predetermined questioner list.  

Writing for Slate in March, 2003, Jack Shafer described Thomas’ snub by the Bush media handlers.

At his televised news conference last week, President George W. Bush deliberately snubbed several reporters he ordinarily calls upon, including journos from the Washington Post, Newsweek, and USA Today.

But the most conspicuous recipient of the 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. freeze-out was longtime UPI reporter Helen Thomas, who has barbed and grilled every president since John F. Kennedy and almost always gets to ask a question. Bush pointedly ignored her.

Bush then dealt Thomas a second slight. By custom, Thomas concludes White House press conferences at the president’s signal by saying, “Thank you, Mr. President.” Bush denied her that supporting role, ending the conference with his own sign off, “Thank you for your questions,” and flushing a decades-old White House custom.

George Bush is back in Texas.  Helen Thomas, the daughter of Christian immigrants from Lebanon, has covered every US president since John F. Kennedy. Now 88, she remains active on the lecture circuit and still writes a syndicated column.

Barack Obama chose to bring Thomas back to the White House press conference privilege list, no doubt aware that in a recent column she addressed the tax problems of Timothy Geithner, the new Secretary of the Treasury, by noting the irony that the Treasury Secretary administers the Internal Revenue Department.

Obama knew that Thomas’ question would not be the softball a Washington Post reporter put to him regarding New York Yankee star Alex Rodriguez. The president addressed A-Rod’s admitted use of steroids in his best sermonic manner, condemning it for setting a bad example for young players.

When he called on Helen, as he called her, he acknowledged her senior status by smiling and saying, “This is my inaugural moment here. (Laughter.) I’m really excited.” . (A video and a transcript of the press conference are available on line.)

Helen Thomas: Mr. President, do you think that Pakistan are maintaining the safe havens in Afghanistan for these so-called terrorists? And also, do you know of any country in the Middle East that has nuclear weapons?

Anyone paying attention to the Middle East would know that Israel was the country she had in mind. As far back as 1975 Israel was believed to have developed a nuclear arsenal in the Negev Desert, close to the Gaza border. (One reason Israel does not want Hamas firing rockets in its direction.)

Wikipedia explains the “deliberate ambiguity”:

The Israeli government refuses to officially confirm or deny whether it has a nuclear weapon program. It has an unofficial but rigidly enforced policy of deliberate ambiguity, saying only that it would not be the first to “introduce nuclear weapons in the Middle East”. . . .Israel is widely believed to be one of four nuclear-armed countries not recognized as a Nuclear Weapons State by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the other three being India, Pakistan and North Korea. The International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Mohamed ElBaradei regards Israel as a state possessing nuclear weapons.

President Obama was not going to make the wrong news at his first presidential press outing by blowing Israel’s cover. So he focused on the Pakistan part of Thomas’ question.

The President: Well, I think that Pakistan — there is no doubt that in the FATA region of Pakistan, in the mountainous regions along the border of Afghanistan, that there are safe havens where terrorists are operating. And one of the goals of Ambassador Holbrooke, as he is traveling throughout the region, is to deliver a message to Pakistan that they are endangered as much as we are by the continuation of those operations. And that we’ve got to work in a regional fashion to root out those safe havens. . .

. . . With respect to nuclear weapons, you know, I don’t want to speculate. What I know is this: that if we see a nuclear arms race in a region as volatile as the Middle East, everybody will be in danger. And one of my goals is to prevent nuclear proliferation generally. I think that it’s important for the United States, in concert with Russia, to lead the way on this. . . .

Thomas tried to ask a follow up question. Ignoring her, Obama turned to a reporter from Huffington Post. This White House knows the importance of the internet.

It will be interesting to see if Thomas makes the privileged list in the next White House press conference. She should.  She belongs to a special journalist category, a writer who refuses to slavishly conform to conventional wisdom.

In his 1986 book, The Uncensored War, Daniel C. Hallin wrote that he needed something to explain journalism other than the usual “calcified notions like objectivity and ‘opinions are confined to the editorial page'”.

Hallin, a press scholar, wanted to explain “the practice of journalism in the United States, and the hidden politics of that practice.” He came up with a simple diagram involving three circles.

Jay Rosen of Press Think  explains the diagram:

 You can draw it by hand right now. Take a sheet of paper and make a big circle in the middle. In the center of that circle draw a smaller one to create a doughnut shape. Label the doughnut hole “sphere of consensus.” Call the middle region “sphere of legitimate debate,” and the outer region “sphere of deviance.”

That’s the entire model. Now you have a way to understand why it’s so unproductive to argue with journalists about the deep politics of their work. They don’t know about this freakin’ diagram! Here it is in its original form.

Rosen describes the three spheres, legitimate debate, consensus and deviance.

1.) The sphere of legitimate debate is the one journalists recognize as real, normal, everyday terrain. They think of their work as taking place almost exclusively within this space. (It doesn’t, but they think so.) Hallin: “This is the region of electoral contests and legislative debates, of issues recognized as such by the major established actors of the American political process.”

Here the two-party system reigns, and the news agenda is what the people in power are likely to have on their agenda. Perhaps the purest expression of this sphere is Washington Week on PBS, where journalists discuss what the two-party system defines as “the issues.” Objectivity and balance are “the supreme journalistic virtues” for the panelists on Washington Week . . .

2. ) The sphere of consensus is the “motherhood and apple pie” of politics, the things on which everyone is thought to agree. Propositions that are seen as uncontroversial to the point of boring, true to the point of self-evident, or so widely-held that they’re almost universal lie within this sphere.

Here, Hallin writes, “journalists do not feel compelled either to present opposing views or to remain disinterested observers.” (Which means that anyone whose basic views lie outside the sphere of consensus will experience the press not just as biased but savagely so.) . . .

3.) In the sphere of deviance we find “political actors and views which journalists and the political mainstream of society reject as unworthy of being heard.” As in the sphere of consensus, neutrality isn’t the watchword here; journalists maintain order by either keeping the deviant out of the news entirely or identifying it within the news frame as unacceptable, radical, or just plain impossible.

The press “plays the role of exposing, condemning, or excluding from the public agenda” the deviant view, says Hallin. It “marks out and defends the limits of acceptable political conduct.”

Anyone whose views lie within the sphere of deviance—as defined by journalists—will experience the press as an opponent in the struggle for recognition. If you don’t think separation of church and state is such a good idea; if you do think a single payer system is the way to go; if you dissent from the “lockstep behavior of both major American political parties when it comes to Israel” . . . chances are you will never find your views reflected in the news. It’s not that there’s a one-sided debate; there’s no debate.

Allison Weir, director of If America Knew, wrote recently of her research on the coverage of the recent Israel invasion of Gaza.  She found that US media was Israeli-centric to such a degree that it created a false portrait of the war.

In Hallin’s categories, to be Israeli-centric is to be part of the “motherhood and apple pie” in the consensus category.  To question this consensus view is to be a part of the deviance categtory.

Weir again:

The media, across the political spectrum, consistently provide Israeli-centric reporting. Our statistical studies of prime-time network news broadcasts during the current uprising, for example, revealed reporting of Israeli children’s deaths at rates up to 14 times greater than reports on Palestinian children’s deaths.

As a result, almost no one knows that 82 Palestinian children were killed before a single Israeli child, that 140 Palestinians were killed before a suicide bombing or that it is Palestinians who are retaliating, not Israelis.

Most recently, while the media – again, across the board – were reporting that Palestinians had broken the latest cease-fire in Gaza, Israel had already violated the cease-fire at least seven times, including killing two and shooting a child. Since these violations were not reported to the public, once again the chronology is reversed in people’s minds.

Few “deviant” journalists, outside of Helen Thomas, can be found in mainstream journalism.  Instead, they reside on the internet, a few write columns, while others appear on progressive television news programs.

Bill Moyers interviewed two of those progressive, internet based journalists, Glenn Greenwald and Jay Rosen, on his PBS Bill Moyers Journal program, February 6. In Hallin’s journalism categories, both Greenwald and Rosen are “deviants”.

In a recent blog entry, deviant Greenwald remains firmly fixed outside the journalism “sphere of consensus” with his report on comments by Middle East expert Aaron David Miller:

This one-sided, ostensibly “pro-Israel” bipartisan inflaming of tensions by the U.S. is nothing new.  Long-time Middle East negotiator Aaron David Miller in Newsweek, earlier this week made one of the most startling revelations in some time — that in all the time the U.S. has supposedly been attempting to forge a Middle East peace agreement over the past 25 years, it never once, in any meaningful way, raised with Israeli leaders the damage that comes from Israeli settlements.

Specifically, said Miller “I can’t recall one meeting where we had a serious discussion with an Israeli prime minister about the damage that settlement activity — including land confiscation, bypass roads and housing demolitions — does to the peacemaking process.”

Miller emphasized that by being so blindly supportive even of misguided Israeli actions, “the United States has allowed that special bond to become exclusive in ways that undermine America’s, and Israel’s, national interests.”

The only way the U.S. can play a constructive role in the Middle East, he argues, is if it is even-handed and, most importantly, willing to criticize Israeli actions when they harm American interests (and their own) and pressure them to stop.

Mr. President, good job with the press conference. Now, are you ready for the growing influence of the “deviant” journalists who roam around that same internet which played such a major role in your election?  You made a good start by bringing Helen Thomas back into the game. Make sure she stays there.  We all need her.

Update on Sam Stein of Huffington Post

In the posting above, I noted that Sam Stein of the Huffington Post, an internet outlet, asked the president a question, following the question asked by Helen Thomas.

Today, The Washington Monthly blog, Political Animal, points out that, aside from a right-wing internet blogger who once tossed President Bush a softball question, Sam Stein becomes the first legitimate blogger to ask a question in a presidential press conference.

Thus, Thomas and Stein become the first two “deviants” (see definition above) to question a president in a White House press conference.

When the Huffington Post‘s Stein stood up last night, he asked an excellent question that the president didn’t want to answer, on an issue most news outlets prefer to ignore:

“Today, Senator Patrick Leahy announced that he wants to set up a truth and reconciliation committee to investigate the misdeeds of the Bush administration. He said that before you turn the page, you have to read the page first. Do you agree with such a proposal? And are you willing to rule out right here and now any prosecution of Bush administration officials?”

The President was evasive in his response (below), but he did elaborate a bit in his evasion.  Note carefully, the mainstream questioners failed to raise the two Thomas-Stein questions that addressed Israel’s nuclear arsenal and the prosecution of Bush administration officials.

The “deviants” have arrived.  White House press conferences may never be the same again.  Unless, that is, the “deviants” are allowed to remain within the media tent.

Here is the President’s response to Stein’s question:

The President: I haven’t seen the proposal, so I don’t want to express an opinion on something that I haven’t seen.

What I have said is that my administration is going to operate in a way that leaves no doubt that we do not torture, and that we abide by the Geneva Conventions, and that we observe our traditions of rule of law and due process, as we are vigorously going after terrorists that can do us harm. And I don’t think those are contradictory; I think they are potentially complementary.

My view is also that nobody is above the law, and if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen; but that generally speaking, I’m more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards. I want to pull everybody together, including, by the way, the — all the members of the intelligence community who have done things the right way and have been working hard to protect America, and I think sometimes are painted with a broad brush without adequate information.

So I will take a look at Senator Leahy’s proposal, but my general orientation is to say, let’s get it right moving forward.