ABC News has a pretty good article and video from January 25th which details some of the origins of the fake Insight Magazine madrassa story — and the Obama camp’s response to it.

But, one section should make Obama supporters* just a little bit nervous. Even if the tone might be unfairly reinforcing the "Obama is too green" media narrative that has developed…

"About three or four months ago, something  started surfing around the Web and it was a pretty scurrilous article  suggesting not only that I had gone to a Madrassa, but that my family  members were Muslim radicals," Obama said. "And we didn’t make much of  it … you can’t control what’s on the Web. What was surprising was that  it eventually bubbled up into the mainstream media."

Were Obama, and others in his campaign, really that surprised? I certainly hope not. While some commentators have expressed admiration for the way the Obama team responded to this smear attempt, others have wondered what took them so long…

"The Obama camp didn’t know whether to deny this, thereby making it a  legitimate issue for every media organization, or whether to ignore it  and hope that false rumor would simply go away," said Larry Sabato,  Robert Kent Gooch Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia.  "They actually failed to make a decision promptly, which probably  brought them the worst of both worlds."

Unfortunately, what we should all have learned from the numerous, unsubstantiated smears made against the Clintons, Al Gore, Howard Dean, John Kerry, and others, is that it doesn’t matter if it’s true.

As the close of ABC’s article suggests…

"Frankly, some of this will stick because no  matter how thoroughly you debunk a story, the allegation is out there,"  Ornstein said.
 

Mark Twain once said that a lie can travel halfway around the  world while the truth is still putting on its shoes. With the  presidential campaign season heating up so soon, those lies have  already begun their travels.

So far, though, it seems to have been a few members of the netroots (particulary JHC at Obamarama.org) who’ve been handling Obama’s rapid response… um… rapidly.

*Disclosure: I’m one of them.

[While I was writing  this, I did a little surfing and realized that the Carpetbagger is discussing the same issue.]

[Crossposted at What’s the Point?]

This argument is sooo 2005.

Darren Allen is a paid political reporter for an award-winning paper. John Odum is a private citizen who uses a particular software platform to do personal publishing.

Journalist vs. blogger? Or just human being vs. human being.

I mean, sure, it must be a little frustrating for hard-working professionals to see uncredentialed citizens slowly cutting into their audience and somewhat rarefied status. I get that, but, c’mon, it’s time to move on.

Just last night on Charlie Rose, before discussing how he enjoys the process of blogging, Brian Williams couldn’t help making what seems to be the contractual obligation to slam blogging (and YouTube) as somehow cutting into some cherished part of a disappearing American water cooler culture. His bosses made him do it, he said.

Had a similar feel to Darren Allen’s recent backhanded article on local blogging. One choice quote:  "Yes, it’s a small audience, but it’s an influential one. As anyone who’s part of it will tell you."

Essentially, according to Allen, blogs are pretty much irrelevant, but his is the most popular one.

Now, I don’t know Darren Allen or Brian Williams. They may be very nice guys. But, I’m afraid that Messrs. Allen and Williams need to accept that the cat is now yowling way outside of the bag.

The media landscape has changed. And likely for the better.

Jay Rosen, the NYU journalism professor (and, by the way, the father of Zack Rosen, Dean for America staffer and co-creator of CivicSpace, a mostly open-source campaign-in-a-box software suite), wrote persuasively in January of 2005 that the argument, Bloggers vs. Journalists, is over.

Rosen writes (after the jump)…

  If my terms make sense, and professional journalism has entered a period of declining sovereignty in news, politics and the provision of facts to  public debate, this does not have to mean declining influence or reputation. It  does not mean that prospects for the public service press are suddenly dim. It  does, however, mean that the old political contract between news providers and  news consumers will give way to something different, founded on what Curley  correctly called a new “balance of power.”
 

Others have seen the change coming. In a 2003 report, New Directions for News said, “Journalism  finds itself at a rare moment in history where … its hegemony as gatekeeper of  the news is threatened by not just new technology and competitors but,  potentially, by the audience it serves.” The professional imagination in Big  Journalism wasn’t prepared for this.
 

Armed with easy-to-use Web publishing tools, always-on connections  and increasingly powerful mobile devices, the online audience has the means to  become an active participant in the creation and dissemination of news and  information.
 

Meanwhile, the credibility of the old descriptions is falling away. People  don’t buy them anymore. In 1988, 58 percent of the public agreed with the  self-description of the press and saw no bias in political reporting, according  to the Pew Research Center. (And that was regarded as a dangerously low figure.)  By 2004, agreement on “no bias” had slipped to 38 percent. “The notion of a neutral, non-partisan mainstream press was, to  me at least, worth holding onto,” wrote Howard Fineman of  Newsweek, Jan. 13. “Now it’s pretty much dead, at least as the public sees  things.”

This past spring  at the Charlie Ross panel discussion at UVM, Howard Fineman reminded us that during the "golden age" of the Walter Cronkite water cooler years, things weren’t necessarily so golden — when the editorial slant at virtually every news organization was determined by the New York Times.

Fineman said, ~You have to ask yourself, when Cronkite said "And that’s the way it is," was it really the way it was?~ Though I wouldn’t have predicted it, Fineman seems to truly understand and appreciate the positive aspects of the emerging user-driven dynamic.

But, today’s press professionals should be able to take solace in the knowledge that they are not alone in slowly losing their status.

As VDB pointed out following the anti-Dean Carville freak-out…

  It’s hard to imagine the post-election Carville/Dean story coming  together without some strong shared need on the part of James Carville  and Anne Kornblut, the journalist behind the New York Times piece.
 

That  point can be broadened without losing its force: Carville’s general  prominence in the days following the election has much to say about the  momentary intersection between his needs and those of the mainstream  media.
 

The best way to summarize that shared need is as follows:  Carville needed to remind the world that he is a professional political strategist, and the mainstream media needed to remind the world that they are professional journalists — and for both, credentials are the key to professional status.
 

Carville and Anne Kornblut share the spotlight as bona fide members of interlocking, complementary professions.
 

Why  the pressing need to stress credentials, for political strategists and  media regulars? Because the real wave this election wasn’t the  Democrats inundating the Republicans.
 

It was the uncredentialled swamping the credentialled.

So, as Rosen says — as does Chris Anderson in the Long Tail — when given the choice of a single source for news, entertainment or political strategy vs.  an almost infinite array of choices, consumers choose the latter.

And that’s the way it is.

Zephyr Teachout writes an interesting op-ed in today’s Burlington Free Press.

Following an example from Estonia where “the legislature created a Web site called “Today I Decide” that tracks all upcoming legislation and allows citizens to propose legislation. If any citizen proposal gets a sufficient number of e-votes, the parliament commits to reviewing it.”, Teachout discusses the various ways we could “now use the Internet for engaging citizens in setting priorities, identifying problems, and drafting and passing legislation.”

She includes a GMD shout-out for good measure…

Connections: The Internet may be the greatest tool for solving collective action problems in the last few hundred years, but unless there are opportunities for people to connect laterally, it becomes another broadcast tool. Wherever a politician posts information online, they should also be sure that there are chances to respond and discuss. If one of the issues on their Web sites is “Energy,” I’d hope they include a section that asks for solutions, and another that asks for help on legislative research. Even connecting to lively, preexisting forums — that they don’t moderate — will enable political connections that would otherwise dead-end after the last sentence. This year’s election season brought out Scudder Parker’s Campaign Blog, Welch’s insta-letter-to-the-editor software; the “Exit Voices” video and blog site for post-voting stories; Philip Baruth’s citizen-interviews; John Odum’s community site, and the Freyneblog that allows you to read Peter’s screed daily, instead of weekly … and screed right back at him.

And she closes with what amounts to a challenge…

A little state like Vermont — following the lead of a little country like Estonia — can lead the way in using the power of the Internet to open up government and engage citizens in the messy, muddy, chaotic world of political decision-making, by bringing the life of politics, not just politicking, online.

So what’re your ideas for doing what Zephyr proposes?

Later today, on the heels of the astounding electoral victory by the Democratic Party, the rising — and now vindicated — star of the party, Howard “Fiddy State” Dean, will announce his engagement to Britney Spears…

UPDATE: Upon hearing of the upcoming Dean/Spears nuptials, Rahm Emanuel stands on table and shouts.

I encourage all GMD readers to join in an interesting experiment in civic participation by going to Exit Voices.

Here’s the description from the About page…

Exit Voices is a place for Burlington voters to share their thoughts and concerns about the people and issues on the ballot. On election day, this blog serves as an online coffee shop where citizens can discuss Vermont politics. All are welcome to participate. Exit Voices is a joint collaboration between CCTV Center for Media and Democracy, Vermont Community Access Media and Candleblog.

The Exit Voices crew (that would be Bill Simmon) is also asking that if you have a blog of your own that you cross-post any of your blog entries on election day in the comments section there. And that would apply to diaries here, too.

As Bill said via email: “Ideally, we would like to use Exit Voices as an aggregator of Vermont political blog posts as well as make it a place for non-bloggers to congregate and discuss the elections.”

Courtesy of Pollster.com, here’s what will probably be the final polling averages on the big three Vermont races before election day.

As the cliche goes… It’s all about the ground game now.

[These charts are slightly interactive… Check and uncheck the checkboxes to your heart’s content… But, please, check yourself before you wreck yourself.]

VDB has a post up today about why we must keep our heads down and continue working hard to elect Scudder Parker to be Vermont’s next Governor.

It’s a great read — linking Scudder’s run to the lessons learned about winning in the classic pool hall novel, the Hustler.

P.B. closes with this…

What Scudder Parker needs, more than anything, is for Democrats to come home.

If just five percent of whimsical Jim Douglas voters decide finally to throw their support to Scudder, the race will be dead even. In other words, the opportunity is here. A better one won’t come along for years. Parker has done his part, and more. He and his volunteers have raced the state from north to south a thousand times, and he’s hit Douglas on his record hard, every day for nearly a year.

But if he’s going to close the deal, he needs an entirely different sort of help.

Because it’s no longer about Scudder Parker, not really. It’s about all of us now, and our own cautious, uncommitted egos.

“You want to be a winner,” Eddie’s disgusted mentor Bert tells him, “you got to keep your head. And you got to remember that there’s a loser somewhere in you, whining at you, and you got to learn to cut his water off. Otherwise you better get a steady job.”

To which VDB says, Amen.

Yes, Amen.

And in case you doubt that Scudder is still in the game, just take a look at this polling chart from the great minds at Pollster.com.

Look closely at those thin blue and red lines that indicate the confidence intervals. And see how nicely they resolve into a point right around 45%.

Just remember, Jim Douglas needs 50% to prevent the Democratic controlled state legislature from deciding his fate.

So, let’s keep hustling.

How ironic that the key word preventing the completely fake John Kerry story from dominating the news cycle is “us.”

Had Kerry included “us” in his comment, none of this absurdity would have come to pass.

Had he not omitted that word, he’d have said “”You know education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well, and if you don’t, you get us stuck in Iraq.”

The joke on Bush would’ve been clear.

But, that single dropping of “us” allowed the Right Wing Noise Machine and the complicit Freak Show press to go into overdrive.

When I was very briefly (a week and a half, maybe) the Grand Leader of All Things Internet Strategy for Zephyr Teachout’s bid for the Vermont seat in Congress — since this potential run was in the news, I hope she doesn’t mind me talking about it — I advocated for using  “for U.S. House” instead of “for Congress” as her tagline.

I liked the “U.S. = us” reference — as opposed to the somewhat randy “congress.”

And, of course, Bernie Sanders’ campaign has since made a nice use of the “for US” underlined in  “for US Senate” in his campaign materials.

But, Kerry, by accident, skipped the “us” in his attempt at mocking Bush and all hell broke loose.

How absurd. And how sad. Because, all of “us” are in this together.

Except those who shamelessly bend the truth for political gain… And those, in the press, who enable them to do so.

[Crossposted on What’s the Point?]

We, in the Vermont blogosphere, have all been plugging away at focusing on Martha Rainville’s forced ambiguous position on the Iraq War — and her similar penchant for trying to have it both ways on a variety of issues.

But, there is one angle that I think has been largely overlooked.

Martha Rainville abandoned her troops in a time of war.

And this is not just me talking here.

It’s recently come to my attention that there’s apparently a wide-spread feeling among many in the Vermont Guard that Martha Rainville put her personal political ambitions over her sworn duty to look after the many brave Vermont men and women who pledged their loyalty and placed their trust in her.

So, when she proudly proclaims that she stood up to the administration to advocate for needed equipment for the Guard serving in Iraq, just remember…

She went and quit the one position where she could’ve had the most influence in doing just that.

Which has created a deep feeling among even Republican-voting Guard members that Ms. Rainville cut and ran when the going got tough. And that she left her troops when they most needed her leadership and advocacy for the most selfish of reasons.

Those are tough words I know. But, that’s a part of the dynamic that will help elect Peter Welch to Congress on November 7th.

I’ve got nothing to add here, but this latest WCAX/Research 2000 poll of the Vermont Governor’s race is definitely good news for Scudder Parker’s campaign and should provide some good positive energy in the closing days of the contest.

Research 2000 found that Governor Douglas still enjoys favorability above 50 percent… but he also has high negatives.. 44 percent.  While Democrat Scudder Parker has favorability of 44 % , he has negatives of 28%  but no opinion of 28%.

This translates into a race that has tightened.. Douglas leads by ten points 51% to 41%, with only 7 percent undecided. Douglas is more popular with men than women.. more popular in the northern counties than the south.

The more people know about Scudder, the more they like him.

Throw him some cash if you can.

And, c’mon ladies and northern Vermont progressives, get to the polls!