The Vision Thing

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"Oh, the vision thing."

George H.W. Bush

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In the waning days of the 2010 midterm campaign, I found myself thinking a lot about Barack Obama's insistence that there was nothing wrong with the message, it just hadn't been conveyed properly.

Well, it seems the voters, in that time–honored way, shot the messenger. But was it fatal? Or was it, in the words of the Black Knight in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," merely a flesh wound?

From what I could see, the voters agree with Obama about many of the things that need to be done. But they elect presidents to make often painful choices between what absolutely positively must be done and what needs to be done but can be put on the back burner.

They did not believe that Obama has been making those tough choices so they tried to get his attention in the only way they could.

The resounding message from the voters on Nov. 2 was not that they had experienced a change of heart about Republican government. They are still wary of the Republican Party, still inclined to blame it for the policies that they believe contributed heavily to the economic mess we face today, and they are particularly concerned about its members who ran as Tea Partiers.

But they were willing to put all that to one side in this election and deliver an urgent message of their own to the Democrats.

The number of voters who told exit pollsters that jobs led their lists of concerns dwarfed everything else — health care, the environment, you name it. And those voters want to see improvement in that area.

Their message was clear — their expectations aren't being met.

What this means for the future of the Obama presidency is not immediately clear. I suspect much will depend upon what Obama does in the next couple of years. He must be a leader. He must bring diverse people together.

He will have to do things he has not had to do up to this point in his life — not just his political life but his life in general.

But Democrats in the House should have taken a long, hard, critical look at the leadership record of Nancy Pelosi.

The electoral defeat, the loss of control of the House was as much Pelosi's failure as Obama's. Yes, Obama is the president, the leader of his party. His support appears to have meant very little for embattled Democrats across the nation, and the Republicans' midterm triumphs are being interpreted as a rejection of Obama's leadership. Certainly, he deserves his share of the blame.

But a loss of this magnitude reflects poorly on the speaker, perhaps more than it does on the president. The president is the head of the executive branch of government; the speaker is the most visible leader of half of the legislative branch.

These were her people who got swept away in the Republican tsunami. Any serious evaluation of the reasons for this defeat must reach the conclusion that Pelosi failed to adequately defend her colleagues — and that is why her retention in a leadership role is so bewildering.

If I had been asked before the election, I would have said that no House speaker who presided over the loss of more than 60 seats in a single election would be kept in a leadership position.

I would have said that, it seems to me, the logical thing for a devastated party to do is seek new blood to lead it.

In fact, if it had been up to me, I would have chosen North Carolina's Heath Shuler over Pelosi.

Shuler, as you may know, spent a few years playing pro football, but he retired after injuring his foot, completed his degree work at the University of Tennessee (where he had been runnerup for the Heisman Trophy) and embarked on a new career in real estate. He was elected to the House in 2006, defeating an eight–term Republican incumbent in a traditionally Republican district.

Anyway, Shuler challenged Pelosi for minority leader and was defeated. The newspaper in the largest city in Shuler's district, the Asheville Citizen–Times, and its readers were not impressed. Leroy Goldman called Shuler's bid for the leadership role a "stunt," and Angela Leonard wrote in a letter to the editor that Shuler should go ahead and join the Republican Party.

Once again, a centrist takes the blunt of the punishment for the extremists' failures.

Pelosi has been speaker since Shuler came to Washington in 2007. In Pelosi's first election after becoming speaker, Democrats enjoyed gains that were primarily due to one of two things — the presence of Obama at the top of the ticket or the presence of George W. Bush in the White House for the previous eight years.

What happened in that election had little, if anything, to do with Pelosi.

But the 2010 election results had Pelosi's fingerprints all over them. She's a polarizing figure, and Republicans capitalized on that in advertisements from coast to coast.

Yes, it is true that this election was, in part, a referendum on Obama. But let's be clear here. They've been conducting presidential approval surveys going back to FDR's days, and what happened to Obama is nothing new in the American experience. It was a little more extreme than most, not new.

But there are certain warning signs Obama should heed as he prepares for his re–election campaign. When I see things like surveys that report that 42% of people under the age of 30 are familiar with the operating system for Google's smartphones but only 14% know who the speaker of the House will be in the next Congress — I have serious doubts about the stability of Obama's 2008 coalition.

That isn't an indictment of young voters only. It seems to me that more members of every demographic group could correctly identify some product than the incoming speaker of the House — and that isn't a very good commentary on the culture in general.

But, frankly, I find it hard to understand why a House speaker whose party has just lost more than five dozen seats, many in Midwestern states that are expected to play pivotal roles in the next presidential election, should be retained as her party's leader. Haven't congressional leaders been toppled for losing much less?

That, certainly, is what recent history has told us. Newt Gingrich, after all, lost his leadership role when the Republicans lost only a handful of seats after the 1998 midterms — but they had been expected to gain ground with Bill Clinton facing impeachment proceedings. I always felt Gingrich was ousted more out of disappointment than anything else.

Gingrich's successor, Dennis Hastert, remained in the House after Democrats reclaimed control of that chamber in 2006, but he did not seek a minority leadership role and retired two years later.

And the last Democratic House speaker before Pelosi, Tom Foley, went down in the Republican tidal wave of 1994. Would he have remained as minority leader if he had not been narrowly rejected? I doubt it.

Pelosi's main argument in favor of her retention seems to be the devout belief that, had it not been for whatever role she may have played in making the tough choices about which Democrats to throw under the bus so they could reallocate electoral resources from what had come to be seen as lost causes, the 2010 midterms would have been much, much worse.

Has a familiar ring to it, doesn't it? It certainly is an odd yardstick for success — "Things could have been worse ..." — but the White House uses it. We'll see how it works out in two years.

Actually, by choosing to keep Pelosi in a leadership position, Democrats seem to be taking their cue from the last time a party lost as many seats in the House as Pelosi's did. It was 62 years ago, when Joe Martin's Republicans lost more than 70 seats after controlling both chambers of Congress for two years.

The House speaker couldn't really take the rap on that one, though. It was a presidential election year, and Democratic President Harry Truman pulled off an unexpected victory over Tom Dewey. In the process, he swept some Democrats into office along with him.

Martin may have shared some of the responsibility for the 1948 losses, but most of it surely belongs with Dewey, the party's titular leader as its presidential nominee.

Martin was retained by the Republicans as minority leader. Then, a few years later, he was restored as speaker of the House when Republicans rode the popularity of Dwight Eisenhower back into congressional power. But they collapsed in the 1954 midterms and remained the minority party for the next 40 years.

So the back–to–the–future example of Martin and the Republicans of 1948 might not be the best one for Democrats to emulate — although, two years ago, I did write about speculation that Obama was following Eisenhower's lead.

If he was, somehow he must have wandered off the path — because, although Ike's Republicans, like Obama's Democrats, were reduced to minority status in the House in the midterm elections, Eisenhower's popularity rating always was greater than his disapproval rating. The same clearly cannot be said for Obama.

I guess, though, it's always possible that Obama knows what he is doing and, in time, he will be vindicated.

Call it that vision thing.

Dewey Defeats Truman

At first, I couldn't believe my eyes.

But there it was, in black and white.

"First woman House speaker may be toppled," said the headline at the Reuters website.

And my first thought was that — in this midterm election year that is looking as bleak for many Democrats as the search for jobs has been for many unemployed Americans — Nancy Pelosi is in electoral trouble.

But then I realized that, if Pelosi really is in trouble, that might be the biggest story in American politics since the Republicans captured the late Ted Kennedy's Senate seat in that special election back in January.

Pelosi, after all, has held her House seat for more than 20 years, and she seldom drops below 80% of the vote.

The very idea that she might be in trouble was absurd, once I thought about it. If there had been even the slightest inkling that Pelosi — who is clearly a lightning rod for the right wing — is in danger of being booted out by her heavily Democratic constituents, word certainly would have leaked out long ago.

The thought that she might be in danger of losing her seat surely would have been seen as an obvious sign of a Democratic apocalypse.

After all, Pelosi's counterpart in the Senate, Harry Reid from neighboring Nevada, is in a tough fight for re–election, and there has been no shortage of articles about it in the media or references to it in political speeches.

Reid's in trouble, and everyone has known it for a long time. He's every bit as reviled by the right as Pelosi is. But, until today, I had heard nothing — nothing! — from the campaign trail in Pelosi's district.

Logic insists that, if there was any chance Pelosi could be driven from office, Republicans would be pouring money into her district and sending their biggest guns to campaign there.

But I've heard no suggestion that Pelosi might not win another term.

And, when I read the article, I realized that what the headline was talking about was the possibility (which I believe is a probability) that the Republicans will capture the House in next Tuesday's elections. Consequently, when the new majority takes over, Pelosi will be replaced as speaker of the House.

But speculating about that at this stage amounts to getting ahead of ourselves. The headline took its cue from the article, but it didn't accurately reflect the content of the article.

I felt the headline was misleading. I know what it was trying to say. It just said it wrong.

Perhaps I am more sensitive to it than most. I worked on newspaper and trade magazine copy desks — which included writing headlines on a regular basis — for more than a decade. I taught young journalism students in the 1990s, and I'm back in the classroom as an adjunct today.

When I work with young journalism students today, I preach the same three values that I preached then — accuracy, consistency and clarity.

The Reuters headline doesn't raise any consistency issues of which I am aware, but it does raise a boatload of accuracy and clarity issues for me. As I say, I think it was misleading. It suggested to me — and I doubt that I could possibly be the only one — that Pelosi was in a tight race for re–election.

In a year in which one of the incumbent Democratic senators from California — as well as incumbent Senate Democrats in places such as Arkansas, Nevada, Wisconsin and Washington — are, at the very least, in trouble and, at most, clearly headed for defeat ...

And political observers have been predicting for weeks, without hesitation, that Republicans are all but sure to pick up at least 39 House seats (and probably more) that are currently held by Democrats, thus giving them the majority in that chamber ...

It isn't unreasonable to interpret a headline that says "First woman House speaker may be toppled" as meaning that Pelosi's race was much, much closer than anyone ever would have predicted.

(If that had really been what the article was reporting, I would have felt that we really had veered into through–the–looking–glass territory.)

But that isn't what the article was saying.

I live two time zones away from California, and I have no idea whether Pelosi is even opposed in this year's election. If she is opposed, the Reuters article didn't mention it. Its emphasis was on what would happen to Pelosi after this year's crop of representatives takes office in January — so I conclude that, if Pelosi has any opposition, it isn't significant.

I don't think the headline was accurate, and it certainly wasn't clear. But was that really the fault of the article — or the reporter who wrote it?

I know that early voting has been under way in many states for several days, if not weeks, by now. In fact, I voted early, as I usually do.

But no votes have been counted yet. No offices have been won or lost yet. The Reuters headline and article act as if the election has been held, the votes have been counted, and the Republicans are going to control the House when Congress convenes.

And, if most political analysts are right, that probably is what is going to happen. But it hasn't happened yet.

Reuters isn't in the fortune telling business. It is in the news reporting business, and, while I have issues with the subject of the article, the reporter was reasonably straight forward in it.

But whoever wrote the headline — whether it was the reporter himself or an editor — was guilty of sloppy speculation.

By and large, the article reported the facts as we know them. The headline strayed.

Far too often, newspapers use whatever headline is attached to news service articles instead of writing their own. They do this for many reasons — deadline pressure is always part of it, but today, with many newspapers cutting back on their copy desks to save money, those editors who are left may be more tempted to use a wire service's headlines than they were before.

Those headlines are written with no space constraints or specified point sizes — which can pose many problems for the editors of real–world newspapers as they try to make those headlines fit whatever space they may have for the story.

But, back at the wire service, space constraints are no barrier. In theory, the headline writer's space is, essentially, infinity. With the apparent freedom to write as little or as much as one needs, there is simply no excuse for imprecision.

When I used to work the wire desk, most headlines that came with wire stories generally appeared to be modestly restrained, as if they were written with some kind of limitation in mind.

Perhaps the articles that were written in those days saved most of their long–term speculation for predictions about sports playoffs.

And none that I can recall got that far ahead of actual events in its speculation.

Seems to me it would be a good idea to keep it that way — until the votes have been counted and we know whether a new speaker of the House will be needed.