Politics & Communication with Joshua Gee

David Brooks has a great article today highlighting President Obama’s often-overlooked successful work on education reform. However, near the end, one sentence bugged me.

Brooks:

Over the next months, there will be more efforts to water down reform. Some groups are offering to get behind health care reform in exchange for gutting education reform. Politicians from both parties are going to lobby fiercely to ensure that their state gets money, regardless of the merits. So will governors who figure they’re going to lose out in the award process.

What groups could he be talking about? I can’t think of, off the top of my head, a group that would have any kind of significant interest in both issues and the clout to make any kind of offer like that worth considering. Teachers unions? They are already solidly behind health care reform. Medical teachers associations? I don’t think they even exist. If Brooks knows of any groups offering a craven deal like that, he could have used his nationally-read column to call them out.

It is too bad he didn’t, because some people say that pundits often use the “some groups/people” convention to create straw men that artificially increase the drama around an issue for the sake of the argument.

According to the Political Wire, there have been 29,000 political television ads aired in Virginia and 20,000 in New Jersey; both states are in the middle of close elections. Here in Massachusetts, I have seen dozens of campaign commercials for the various Senate candidates. Okay, I have seen dozens of ads for Steve Pagliuca and one for Mike Capuano. However, the only two commercials I saw this month that really caught my eye weren’t from any of these races. Find out what they were, and the stories behind them, after the jump.

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So I am only in Boston a few weeks when the MBTA launches a brand new map.

From The Boston Globe

The map is updated to include key bus routes along with subway lines, commuter rail lines and the Silver Line (enhanced bus service). It is also updated to be more geographically accurate (which I love in transit maps). This is also the first time in more than 40 years some neighborhood maps have been updated. Those are the maps that, when you get off the subway, show the surrounding neighborhood. Check out this description of the old neighborhood map at Government Center (not exactly and out of the way corner of Boston) to demonstrate how important this improvement is:

The neighborhood map that was also replaced in Government Center had not changed since 1967, when the station was known primarily as Scollay Square. It showed, for example, the old elevated highway where the Rose Kennedy Greenway now sits, as well as a planned linear office building near Faneuil Hall that instead became the Holocaust Memorial.

I am a big fan of this development. Improvements like this are not on par with a new subway line, but do make a significant improvement in the daily image and usability of the system. I am pretty curious why map replacement systemwide is expected to take two years. That seems like a really long time. Also, you know what would really make the T more usable – late night subway service!

Sources: Universal Hub – Bostonist – Boston Globe

I had pretty much given up on Meet The Press over the past few months. David Gregory has done a miserable job as host. While sometimes lame, Tim Russet’s “gotcha” questions at least used guests’ previous statements to hold their feet to the fire. Gregory’s hard questions for more often fall into the hackneyed “Some people say…” formulation that is one of the lamest, and laziest, tropes in American journalism. This also means that guests can spin away Gregory’s questions while Russert gave himself a simple but devastating follow-up, “Then why did you say that?”

Even during the Russert days, the second half of the show was the weaker. If you don’t know, it usually features a round table of journalists and pundits who debate and discuss the issues of the day. At best, this was boring and at worst, it was absurdly masturbatory as the same crew of commentators would parrot “conventional wisdom” and all sort of agree with each other while nodding sagely. Even when they disagreed they tended to just ignore what the other panelists were saying; any of them could blatantly lie and none of them would call them out on it. Someone more partisan than me would also point out that the vast majority of the commentators are older and lean conservative.

This morning, Rachel Maddow was a member of the round table along with usual suspects Mike Murphy, E.J. Dionne, David Brooks. Apparently Maddow has been on the show occasionally since April but this is the first time I have seen her. It was outstanding. She didn’t let the others get away with bland generalizations or generic spin, getting into their face with follow up questions and factual rebuttals. In the face of some honest debate, Muphy and Brooks rose to the occasion and reminded me that they are actually really smart guys. The discussion was civil – if at times heated – and, for political junkies like myself, fabulously entertaining.

I really hope that MTP continues to add more liberal and young commentators to these round tables. Maddow is great, but isn’t the only one out there. Ezra Klien, Matt Yglesias or Josh Marshall would all be great additions. Not only would I like to see more people who might represent my views, but seeing smart people debate issues is good television!