Gitell on NECN NewsNight

Watch me here on NECN NewsNight along with key Barack Obama fundraiser Alan Solomont. The host is, of course, Jim Braude.

Gitell on NECN NewsNight

I will be part of NECN’s Election Night coverage. My appearance will be during the 8:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. block.

Hillary Clinton and 1960s Radicalism

Remember my post on Hillary Clinton’s vulnerability to charges of radicalism after the last Democratic debate?

Now I’m joined in that thought by former 1960s radical Tom Hayden. Here’s what he writes in The Nation:

“Hillary is blind to her own roots in the sixties…She was in Chicago for three nights during the 1968 street confrontations. She chaired the 1970 Yale law school meeting where students voted to join a national student strike again an “unconscionable expansion of a war that should never have been waged.” She was involved in the New Haven defense of Bobby Seale during his murder trial in 1970, as the lead scheduler of student monitors. She surely agreed with Yale president Kingman Brewster that a black revolutionary couldn’t get a fair trial in America. She wrote that abused children were citizens with the same rights as their parents.

Most significantly in terms of her recent attacks on Barack, after Yale law school, Hillary went to work for the left-wing Bay Area law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, which specialized in Black Panthers and West Coast labor leaders prosecuted for being communists. Two of the firm’s partners, according to Treuhaft, were communists and the two others ‘tolerated communists’.” 

 

 

Jeremiah Wright’s Media Tour

I caught most of Jeremiah Wright’s address to the National Press Club today. There’s no way this can be helpful to the campaign of Barack Obama. It was notable that Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, called into MSNBC on-air to push back against the wire-to-wire coverage of Wright’s media tour. That’s the best evidence that the Obama campaign would love to see Wright just go away. The fact that he isn’t means damage for the campaign, both now and for November.

Pennsylvania Primary: After Action Report

I have to give great credit to Suffolk University’s David Paleologos for once again nailing the PA primary result.

This is my third experience of being in a state the night prior to an election and experiencing the tremendous enthusiasm around Barack Obama, only to see him lose. Hillary Clinton may not pull passionate supporters at rallies in such large numbers as Obama, but her people come out and vote on election day.

I’m starting to think that members of the media are mislead by these exuberant events. Obama supporters, to be sure, are the most likely to go to rallies and then to vote on election day. And, if you are a passionate Obama backer, you are likely to go to a rally to be part of the Obama experience. But few observers ever consider the people who don’t go to Obama rallies when he’s in town. The people who don’t show up aren’t necessarily Obama voters, and reporters don’t interview them .

Also to my comments about the Jewish community. According to Andrea Mitchell today on MSNBC, the Jewish community in Pennsylvania was divided on its support, as I suggested it would be.

PA Primary Update: Millvale

Yesterday my reporting took me to the Western Pennsylvania community of Millvale. Millvale lies only minutes from the heart of Pittsburgh, but its distance across the Allegheny River makes this compact former industrial town feel much farther away.

The big issue in town is flooding, which has contributed to pervasive job loss. Local officials present said Senator Clinton understood the needs of a small town like this more than her opponent, Mr. Obama.

Bill Clinton showed up for a campaign event at the old St. Ann’s Church. It looks like one of the many proud old Catholic and Orthodox churches that dot this area, but is now a night club, Mr. Smalls Funhouse, owned by members of the jam band Rusted Root. The church is now a club because the area’s dwindling population has meant the consolidation of parishes.

Clinton spoke for just over ten minutes. His was a classic political stump speech. “If you’re hearing somebody say you better quit because you can’t win, it’s because they’re afraid you will win,” he said.

After the crowd poured out of the church, onlookers lined up along the hilly street adjacent to it to catch a glimpse of him leaving. He exited wearing glasses but quickly took them off when he noticed there was such a large crowd waiting. He gave them the classic Clinton, bit lip and thumbs up. Then before he got in his vehicle he crossed the street to hug 85-year-old May Mayhugh, standing out on her porch. Mayhugh who had just gotten out of the hospital.

“I have prospered under Bill Clinton, and I’ll be happy to have another Clinton in the White House,”  Millvale’s mayor, Vincent Cinski, said after Clinton had departed. 

It’s important to point out that despite the economic plight of Millvale, it has a branch of the fabulous Pittsburgh chain of diners, Pamela’s, famous for the breakfast and pancakes. But due to the observance of Passover, I have no report on this PA food find today.

 

Obama v. Hillary: Showdown in Philadelphia

 

Philadelphia won’t be the City of Brotherly Love tomorrow night when Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama debate for the first time in seven weeks. That last debate was a long time ago, some seven weeks, before Jeremiah Wright and before Obama called small town folk “bitter.”

This scenario holds a frightening prospect for Obama who is the favorite for the nomination but hasn’t put it away yet. Typically front-runners want to run out the clock. Plus, the debate will be televised on network television, which will lead to higher ratings than events on cable. “This debate could garner the most viewers of any of the debates — there have been more than 20 during the past year — according to a Northeastern University associate professor and expert on presidential debates, Alan Schroeder. Unlike most debates in this interminable election, which have been relegated to the backwaters of cable, tomorrow night’s discussion will be on network television, ABC, during prime time.”

Read my New York Sun column here.

Mark Leibovich on Chris Matthews

 

 

There are a couple gems in Boston Phoenix alum Mark Leibovich’s profile of Chris Matthews. Leibovich, for example, delves into a subject about which I’ve always been curious — the rivalry between NBC’s two Irish American political gurus, Matthews and Tim Russert:

 

“Tim — as in Russert, the inquisitive jackhammer host of ‘Meet the Press’ — is a particular obsession of Matthews’s. Matthews craves Russert’s approval like that of an older brother. He is often solicitous. On the morning of the Cleveland debate, Matthews was standing in the lobby of the Ritz when Russert walked through, straight from a workout, wearing a sweat-drenched Buffalo Bills sweatshirt, long shorts and black rubber-soled shoes with tube socks. ‘Here he is; here he is, the man,’ Matthews said to Russert, who smiled and chatted for a few minutes before returning to his room. (An MSNBC spokesman, Jeremy Gaines, tried, after the fact, to declare Russert’s outfit ‘off the record.’)

Matthews has berated Russert to several people at NBC and has told friends and associates that Russert is like John F. Kennedy while he is more like Richard Nixon. Kennedy was the golden boy while Nixon was the scrapper for whom nothing came easily. It’s an imperfect comparison, certainly (Matthews is Irish Catholic, for starters, and Russert is not charismatic by any classic Kennedyesque definition), but it does offer a glimpse into how Matthews perceives himself, especially in relation to Russert. It’s also worth noting that Nixon was obsessed with Kennedy, and Kennedy could be dismissive and disparaging of Nixon.

A number of people I spoke with at NBC said that Russert can be disdainful of Matthews, whose act he often sees as clownish. They also told me that Russert believes Matthews is something of a loose cannon who brings him undue headaches in his capacity as NBC’s Washington bureau chief. This friction was immortalized in notes revealed during the trial of Scooter Libby. Mary Matalin, an adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, was quoted as having suggested that Libby call Russert to complain about Matthews’s rants against the White House’s Iraq policy. ‘Call Tim — he hates Chris,’ Matalin supposedly told Libby. Russert denies that he felt this way then or now. ‘I’ve always had a very good relationship with Chris,’ he told me. ‘We do different things.’ Matalin, for her part, insists that she doesn’t remember ever saying that Russert ‘hates Chris.’ “

 

It was a gutsy piece for Leibovich, who shares a literary agent with Matthews, to do. He seemed to be pushing the envelope of on and off-the-record a bit. For example, I’m curious as to whether Matthews considered the following two exchanges on-the-record. To me they have the sound of classically off-the-record discussions.

” ‘Don’t talk to anyone who hasn’t known me 30 years,’ he instructed, not for the first time. That, he said, will show readers that Chris Matthews hasn’t changed, that he has always been the way he is. The implication, also, is that it would be hard to change him now.”

“He’s big into the Pennsylvania primary, talks a lot to ‘Eddie Rendell’ and urged me repeatedly to call the Pennsylvania governor’s office and ‘talk to Eddie Rendell about me.’ “

My best guess about what happened is that Matthews did what he always does, talk, talk, talk.

I view myself as a borderline fan of Matthews. I find his opinionated brand of questioning infuriating, his anti-Hillary bias maddening. Yet, at the same time, I completely respect his knowledge and his mastery of the details of Washington.

Leibovich reports that the NBC bigs are pushing Olbermann as the heir apparent, a notion I find completely disheartening. Olbermann is snarky, but that’s about it. Sitting through an hour of Olbermann is like watching a televised version of a Daily Kos diary, and the Kos plays much, much better online than it would on t.v.

 

Gitell on NECN: It’s All About Blue Collar Whites

Watch me in Kristen Caira’s report on NECN. I address the importance of white blue collar voters to both the Democratic Primary and general election. Note that the segment relies upon fresh sound from two individuals — me and 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, a Barack Obama supporter.

Viral Bullying

 

Katharine Herrup, an engaging young writer with The New York Sun, has an interesting piece on an overbearing viral marketing campaign. The focus of Herrup’s piece are a series of mysterious ads that have popped up all over New York City saying things like “My mom always hated you Sarah Marshall.” They are adds for a new film called Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

“They are supposed to depict Peter’s revenge, a public smear campaign of his ex. But they sound like catty adolescent girls talking about an ostracized classmate — not an infrequent occurrence in reality.

If you are confused, you are supposed to be. The ‘Sarah Marshall’ ads are a new chapter in the viral marketing trend, which generates curiosity through vague messages. The recent film ‘Cloverfield’ rode its own clever viral marketing campaign — which included ambiguous TV commercials, cheeky product placement, and artificially-generated fan sites — to a huge opening weekend at the box office.

But the ‘Sarah Marshall’ ads eschew that clever spirit for blunt, easy impudence. These ads are toxic — not the direction viral marketing should go.”