Former Pentagon spokesman Ken Bacon has died.  He was only 64.

Kenneth H. Bacon, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who became chief Pentagon spokesman under President Bill Clinton, died Saturday at age 64.

Bacon had been battling melanoama, and was on leave was his job as president of Refugees International, a Washington-based group he joined in early 2001.

[...]

“Prior to working at RI, Mr. Bacon was Assistant Secretary, Public Affairs, at the U.S. Department of Defense and served as Pentagon spokesman from 1994-2001. From 1969 to 1994, he was a reporter, editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal based in Washington, DC. He received his Bachelor’s degree from Amherst College, and a Master’s degree in Business Administration and Master’s degree in Journalism.”

Sad news.

Rupert Murdoch thinks he’s figured out how to fix the ailing newspaper industry: Starting charging for online content!

Rupert ­Murdoch expects to start charging for access to News Corporation’s newspaper websites within a year as he strives to fix a ­”malfunctioning” business model.

Encouraged by booming online subscription revenues at the Wall Street Journal, the billionaire media mogul last night said that papers were going through an “epochal” debate over whether to charge. “That it is possible to charge for content on the web is obvious from the Wall Street Journal’s experience,” he said.

Asked whether he envisaged fees at his British papers such as the Times, the Sunday Times, the Sun and the News of the World, he replied: “We’re absolutely looking at that.” Taking questions on a conference call with reporters and analysts, he said that moves could begin “within the next 12 months‚” adding: “The current days of the internet will soon be over.”

Good luck with that.  Pretty much everyone who has tried to charge for online news has failed.  WSJ has been something of an exception but only because they’re selling specialized content to a niche audience with a strong incentive to pay for information.   Even WSJ hasn’t tried to charge for its editorials, for example.

Chris Bertram passes along news of a recent survey showing that “Some 80 per cent of news stories in the quality UK national newspapers are at least partly made up of recycled newswire or PR copy.”  Not only does that call into question whether they’re worth paying for but, more importantly, it demonstrates that most of the information is ubiquitous.  Unless all the news producers band together into a cartel, shuttering it off from the non-paying public, any per-per-view scheme is doomed to fail.

Let’s assume a cartel is established and passes regulatory muster.  Aside from the various illegal password sharing sites that would immediately spring up, people would immediately begin reposting the most valuable material to non-pay sites under Fair Use rules.   Even if copyright law were re-written making that harder and even if enforcement were superb, the most that could happen would be to protect the original phrasing of the source news site; the information contained thereon would still be widely disseminated.

With slightly more effort, I could have rewritten the introductory portion of this post in the way the major papers re-write wire copy and the work of other newspapers.  That is, I’d have summarized the story, pulled all of the pertinent Murdoch quotes, and added in some sort of attribution statement (”according to a Guardian report” or some even less generous acknowledgment).    Ironically, that would be worse for the industry than that status quo, which at least provides a direct link to their content that some number of readers will click, producing pageviews for their ads.

In the discussion section of Steve Verdon’s Obama the Fear Monger post, commentor Drew and I had a brief debate about the possibility of using TARP funds to create new banks rather than try to rescue old ones.  In today’s Wall Street Journal, Paul Romer of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research makes this argument as well, with more sophistication than I could muster.  The core of his argument is:

The government has $350 billion in Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds that it can use to encourage new bank lending. If this money is directed to newly created good banks with pristine balance sheets, it could support $3.5 trillion in new lending with a modest 9-to-1 leverage. Right out of the gate, the newly created banks could do what the Fed has already been doing — buying pools of loans originated by existing banks that meet high underwriting standards.

If the TARP funds go to existing banks, much of them will end up stuck in financial institutions that are still bad after the transfer. We know from the previous round of TARP that giving more capital to bad banks generates very little net new lending.

Proposals for turning existing banks into good banks — recapitalizing them, nationalizing them, transferring the toxic assets off their balance sheets, or insuring the toxic assets — require prices for all these hard-to-value assets or, worse still, prices for derivative contracts on the toxic assets. (Calling the derivatives “insurance” doesn’t make them any easier to price.) Without reliable market prices for the hard-to-value assets, any proposal for turning bad banks into good banks could lead to huge transfers of wealth between taxpayers and bank shareholders.

Since I was proposing this as well, I obviously agree with the sentiment.  The key question is whether we think it is even possible to salvage some of our large troubled banks.  If it is, then it probably makes sense to do so and tap into their existing relationships and expertise (tarnished though it is).  But if you think – as I do – that they cannot be saved given the finite resources that can be committed due to political constraints, then this approach, as ugly and messy as it seems may turn out to be the most promising.

Hat tip: Matt Yglesias

As 2008 winds to an end, it’ll soon be time for the OTB staff to post its predictions for the coming year.   First, though, is the painful look back at our predictions for 2008.

Predictions that came to pass

• The Republicans will eventually nominate someone, pundit chatter about a divided base notwithstanding.

• “Ron Paul won’t win a single state primary. If he runs as a Libertarian or other third party, he won’t get a single electoral vote.”  (Paul came in 2nd place in 10 states and 3rd in 17.)

• The eventual president will be either a Democrat or Republican, regardless of whether Ron Paul, Mike Bloomberg, or anyone else runs on a third party ticket.

• “Nothing of any substance will be accomplished by the Congress on any of the following issues: immigration, healthcare, Social Security, education, product safety of imports.”

• “President Bush will not be impeached by the House of Representatives” — nor will any past or former administration official be tried for war crimes.

• The United States will have 100,000 or more troops in Iraq at year’s end. The trend toward lower body counts will continue but civil society will remain an elusive goal.

• Vladimir Putin will still be running Russia at year’s end — but with a new title. (Arguably, this could go in the “Not Enough Data” category.  But most analysts think Putin’s still the Man.)

• Neither the U.S. nor Israel will either bomb or invade Iran.

• The Lisbon Treaty will fail, forcing a dramatic rethinking of the European Union’s agenda.

• The Wall Street Journal will be a more successful paper with Rupert Murdock running it.

• Sirius and XM will be allowed to merge.

• The television writers strike will end but the major networks will never recover their market share, making it a lose-lose proposition.

• The Boston Celtics will win the NBA championship.

Predictions that did not come to pass

• The winner will be a Protestant white guy, defying predictions of the First Woman, First Black, or First Mormon President.  (If I were a lawyer, I’d claim to be mostly right here in that a Protestant guy was elected.  As a political scientist, however, this was all wrong.)

• Pervez Musharraf will still be president of Pakistan at year’s end. One way or the other.  (He resigned on August 18th.  I’m happy to be wrong on this one.)

• The New England Patriots will beat the Dallas Cowboys in the Super Bowl, becoming the first 19-0 team in NFL history.  (The Pats went 18-0 before losing in the Super Bowl to the wild card New York Giants.  The Cowboys went 13-3 and then choked in the playoffs, losing to the Giants.)

• The Atlanta Braves will win the World Series with a starting rotation of pitchers in the twilight of their careers.  (Instead, all three of their top pitchers wound up on the injured reserve and the team was quite mediocre.)

• Katie Couric will not finish the year as anchor of the CBS Evening News.  (She’s rumored to be out in January, though.)

• NBC will pull the plug on one of its cable news ventures. (Why they haven’t escapes me.)

Half-Right / Half-Wrong

• The Democrats will retain both the Houses of Congress, picking up two seats in the Senate while losing fourteen of the House seats they picked up in 2006.  (Even aside from the over-specificity of the prediction, the Dems picked up House seats.)

• Tiger Woods will win two Majors, passing Bobby Jones and coming within two of Jack Nicklaus.  (He won one in spectacular fashion — on a broken leg — but then sat out the rest of the season.)

• The United States will finally win the gold medal in basketball again, along with the overall gold medal count, in this summer’s Olympic Games. Few will much care.  (China won the gold count easily, although the USA won more medals overall.)

Final Tally:  Actually, better than I remembered having done:  13-6-3.    If you take off the overly glib predictions, it falls to 11-6-3, which still isn’t bad.   I did, however, get the 2008 presidential election, World Series, and Super Bowl wrong, so not great on a weighted scale.

Correction:  I moved the Olympics prediction into the half/half category and updated the tally accordingly after a commenter pointed out that I’d ignored a third of my prediction.

Cernig is outraged at the sex-obsessed American press.

I am now officially disgusted with America’s insular and navel-gazing punditry. En masse and on a bipartisan basis the media, commentators and bloggers have decided that the Edwards Affair story is more important than events in South Ossetia. What happened, folks, did your minds cloud over at contemplation of events beyond these hallowed shores?

Maybe someone can enlighten me as to why the story of yet another politician who ran as a Loyal Family Man but was unable twice to gain the highest of offfices being revealed as a lying hypocrite unable to keep it in his pants is remotely as newsworthy as a full-on war between one of the world’s great powers and a nation which is a vocal ally of the USA. Because I admit I’m utterly perplexed by the allocation of priorities here.

I almost wrote a variant of that post this morning, whilst looking for updates on the Georgia story and noting that the Edwards story dominated the front page of the Washington Post’s website.  I went to the NYT website, though, and saw that the Georgia story was well covered there and, lacking a hook, let it go.

While Cernig and I are generally on the opposite sides of issues, I respect his integrity so decided to give the story another looksee.  It turns out that, while there’s no doubt that the Edwards story is getting major play, the Russia-Georgia-South Ossetia story is getting far, far more.  Indeed, even the Olympics is getting more coverage than the Edwards story.

The screencap at the top right of this post is from Memeorandum.  As of this writing (6:37 Eastern Saturday evening) even the blogosphere has made Georgia the top focus [a marked contrast from 7:40 am, when, as Cernig's link shows, the top two-thirds of the page was dominated by Edwards coverage].  I say “even” because it’s a relatively hard story to opine upon, in that almost every political blogger already knew who John Edwards is and understood the concepts of lying and adultery.  Conversely, most are catching up on the Russia-Georgia-South Ossetia story.

I went to Newseum, which archives the front pages of virtually every paper in the world, to get a broader sample of the mainstream papers.  I was pleasantly surprised.

The major national papers all gave more prominent treatment to the Russia-Georgia clash than Edwards.

The New York Times:

The Washington Post:

The Wall Street Journal:

Even the conservative Washington Times, which presumably has no love for Edwards, did so:

My hometown paper, the Anniston (Alabama) Star did, too:

Indeed, the only paper I checked that played the Edwards story first — and rightfully so — is the Charlotte Observer, the major paper in Edwards’ home state.

I tend not to watch much television news but I presume that the 24/7 coverage skewed towards the Edwards scandal.  But that’s, no pun intended, a sexier story.

I must admit, I’m surprised by this outcome.  The publishers of papers around the country chose to highlight a story that was very unlikely to sell papers over one that would.  Let’s face it, the average person is much more interested in celebrity sex scandals — and this one has plenty of good angles to it — and not than in foreign policy.  Much less conflicts over obscure secessionist areas.

Let’s face it, most Americans were only vaguely aware until yesterday that there’s a second place called Georgia.  I have my PhD with a specialization in national security policy and would only be somewhat more informed about this conflict than the man on the street if I hadn’t been surrounded for the past several months with smart people who study European politics for a living.

The Mahdi Army might soon be the Iraqi equivalent of the Salvation Army, Gina Chon reports for the Wall Street Journal.

Anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr — long a thorn in the side of the U.S. military and Iraqi government — intends to disarm his once-dominant Mahdi Army militia and remake it as a social-services organization.

The transformation would represent a significant turnabout for a group that, as recently as earlier this year, was seen as one of the most destabilizing anti-American forces in Iraq. For much of the past several years, the Mahdi Army, headed by Mr. Sadr, a Shiite cleric, controlled sizable chunks of Baghdad and other cities. Its brand of pro-Shiite activism had the side effect of pitting Iraqis against each other, helping to stir worries of civil war.

Recently, however, the group has been hit by a largely successful Iraqi military crackdown against militia members operating as criminal gangs. At the same time, Mr. Sadr’s popular support is dwindling: Residents who once viewed the Mahdi Army as champions of the poor became alienated by what they saw as its thuggish behavior.

A new brochure, obtained by The Wall Street Journal and confirmed by Mr. Sadr’s chief spokesman, Sheik Salah al-Obeidi, states that the Mahdi Army will now be guided by Shiite spirituality instead of anti-American militancy. The group will focus on education, religion and social justice, according to the brochure, which is aimed at Mr. Sadr’s followers. The brochure also states that it “is not allowed to use arms at all.”

This would be a wonderful development if true.  I fear, however, that this will be merely one arm of a larger organization, following a model successfully pioneered by the likes of Hamas.

Spencer Ackerman agrees. Noting that we’ve seen predictions of Sadr’s demise before, he writes, “An alternative explanation would hold that Sadr is making yet another of his endless tactical retrenchments and is embedding his movement ever deeper within the fiber of Shiite Iraqi society, establishing an alternative infrastructure to Maliki’s failed governance, and retaining his military option for future use.”

AllahPundit is skeptical too, asking, “[W]hat’s a jihadi to do when he can’t wage jihad? Simple. Wage inner jihad.”  He continues, “Sounds like they’re playing nice for now and rebuilding their popular/religious legitimacy while they build a Hezbollah off-premises, presumably for a surge of their own when conditions allow.”

Could well be.  Or, just perhaps, he’s decided that he doesn’t need violent means to achieve his political aims at this stage.  Maybe he figures he can run as a candidate in the next election — whenever it turns out to be — and win the thing.

And, as Ackerman notes, he wouldn’t have to give up anything. So long as he’s got followers, he can pull out the guns whenever he wants.

AP Photo/Alaa al-Marjani

David Kaplan reports on a big shake-up at Wall Street Journal:

WSJ is cutting 50 editorial positions as it moves to reform editing functions across print, online and mobile, according to a staff memo written by Robert Thomson, the News Corp (NYSE: NWS). paper’s managing editor. The Global News, Global Copy, Global Pagination, Monitor and the stand alone WSJ.com editing desks “will cease to exist” as the separation between those areas are taken down. The New York offices will be the central editing hub and most of the editorial operations in South Brunswick will be closed.

Peter Kafka points out that this “move has been telegraphed for many months.”

At his D Conference in late May, for instance, Murdoch expressed amazement that each piece of WSJ copy is touched by an average of 8.3 people before it gets into print: “That’s ridiculous”. That average is almost certainly going to shrink now.

Indeed.  My boss is a former senior editor at the Journal and he speaks with reverence for the paper’s high editorial standards.   There’s something to be said for having layers of editors going through copy to improve the writing, ask the right questions, and generally provide seasoned input.  Maybe 8.3 hands are too many, though.

WSJ points to the failure of so-called ‘hyperlocal’ news portals, focusing on a WaPo venture.

For believers in the power of rigorous local coverage to help save newspapers, the Washington Post’s launch of LoudounExtra.com last July was a potentially industry-defining event. It paired a journalistic powerhouse with a dream team of Internet geeks to build a virtual town square for one of Virginia’s and the nation’s most-affluent and fastest-growing counties.

Almost a year later, however, the Web site is still searching for an audience. Its chief architect has left for another venture in Las Vegas, and his team went with him. And while Post executives say they remain committed to providing so-called hyperlocal news coverage, they are re-evaluating their approach. “It’s too early for us to put any kind of stamp on it as a success or failure,” said Jim Brady, executive editor of Washingtonpost.com, a unit of Washington Post Co. “We’re just going to keep experimenting,” he added.

Like hundreds of other hyperlocal sites launched in the past few years, LoudounExtra.com reflects a basic premise: Metro newspapers probably can’t compete with the Internet or cable TV in covering breaking national and international news, but they can dominate what happens in their backyards. LoudounExtra.com offers detailed databases including every church, restaurant and school in Loudoun County, about 25 miles west of Washington, D.C. It embraces the idea that a high-school prom is as newsworthy as a debate over where to build a hospital, and that Little League deserves major-league attention. And it promises to let visitors to the site shape the news through blogs and photo and video submissions.

My initial thought was that Loudoun County was simply a bad choice for this kind of thing. Its residents, of which I was one until marrying and moving to neighboring Fairfax County, are primarily people like myself: professionals from elsewhere who came in search of work in the high tech, defense, government, and media sectors. Those kind of people tend not to have much concern about local activities because they don’t consider themselves locals.

However true that may be, though, LoudounExtra’s problem was much more basic:

But LoudounExtra.com remains little more than a skeleton of the site its architects pledged to build. One reason: the team of outsiders didn’t do enough to familiarize itself with Loudoun County or engage its 270,000 residents.

The whole point of hyperlocal coverage is that it’s written by locals! Otherwise, you have reports written by people with no idea of the backstory. Certainly, someone with decent reporting skills can cover City Hall or even high school football or the church scene based on observation. But without local experience, there’s no context. A local paper can absorb reporters and editors from elsewhere on a piecemeal basis, of course, but if there’s no institutional knowledge of the local community, it’s doomed to fail.

via memeorandum

Romesh Ratnesar takes to the pages of TIME to ask, in apparent seriousness, “Is It Time to Invade Burma?”

The disaster in Burma presents the world with perhaps its most serious humanitarian crisis since the 2004 Asian tsunami. By most reliable estimates, close to 100,000 people are dead. Delays in delivering relief to the victims, the inaccessibility of the stricken areas and the poor state of Burma’s infrastructure and health systems mean that number is sure to rise. With as many as 1 million people still at risk, it is conceivable that the death toll will, within days, approach that of the entire number of civilians killed in the genocide in Darfur.

So what is the world doing about it? Not much. The military regime that runs Burma initially signaled it would accept outside relief, but has imposed so many conditions on those who would actually deliver it that barely a trickle has made it through. Aid workers have been held at airports. U.N. food shipments have been seized. U.S. naval ships packed with food and medicine idle in the Gulf of Thailand, waiting for an all-clear that may never come.

[...]

That’s why it’s time to consider a more serious option: invading Burma. Some observers, including former USAID director Andrew Natsios, have called on the U.S. to unilaterally begin air drops to the Burmese people regardless of what the junta says. The Bush Administration has so far rejected the idea — “I can’t imagine us going in without the permission of the Myanmar government,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday — but it’s not without precedent: as Natsios pointed out to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. has facilitated the delivery of humanitarian aid without the host government’s consent in places like Bosnia and Sudan.

Let me just go on the record: Hell no, it’s not time to invade Burma. Are you friggin’ kidding me?

Frankly, I don’t care what the junta in Burma wants. The international community doesn’t recognize them as legitimate. If the people who do these things for a living decide that ignoring the junta and dropping relief supplies will do more good than harm, I don’t have any problems with it.

But coercive humanitarian intervention? No, thanks.

Ted Sorenson has finally admitted that he had a large role in writing Profiles in Courage, for which John F. Kennedy won a Pulitzer Prize as a solo author.

According to a Wall Street Journal review, Sorensen says, for the first time, that he “did a first draft of most chapters,” “helped choose the words of many of its sentences” and likely “privately boasted or indirectly hinted that I had written much of the book.”

In other words, he wrote the book, Kennedy did some very late editing, and claimed it as his own work.

Sorensen also admits that in 1957 — just after the book won a Pulitizer Prize — that Kennedy “unexpectedly and generously offered, and I happily accepted, a sum” for Sorensen’s work on the book.

It was, quite literally, the least he could do.

A new NBC/WSJ poll shows that being seen as too close to George W. Bush is bringing John McCain down. I’m pretty sure that Peter Hart and Neil Newhouse already knew that, since I did, but it’s good to put a number on these things (43 percent, as it turns out).

Other interesting findings:

• 36 percent have major concerns that Clinton seems to change her position on some issues (like driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants and the North American Free Trade Agreement, which her husband signed but which she now opposes)

• 34 percent say they’re bothered by Obama’s “bitter” remarks

• 32 percent have a major problem with the Illinois senator’s past associations with Wright and the 1960s radical William Ayers

• 27 percent have serious concerns that Bill Clinton would have too much influence on U.S. policy decisions if his wife is elected

I’d be interested in the crosstabs on these, however. Are the people with these “concerns” and “problems” supporters of the other candidate? Republicans? Indeed, given that 43-45 percent of the public is predisposed to vote for McCain against either Obama or Clinton, it’s surprising that the numbers on all three questions are so small. They may actually be non-problems. [Update: I emailed Newhouse and he points out that these are major and serious concerns and that the numbers "flatten out" when adding in those with moderate concerns.]

The poll also seems to confirm that McCain was the Republicans’ best option in this environment:

Indeed, even though Democrats have an 18-point advantage over Republicans in a generic presidential ballot test (51-33 percent), this latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey shows Obama besting McCain by only three points (46-43 percent) and Clinton topping the Arizona senator by only one (45-44 percent).

“This poll,” Newhouse said, “continues to show a very difficult road for Republicans in the fall — with the exception of John McCain, who is running toe to toe with the Democrats.”

We’ll see what those numbers do once the Democrats have a nominee, though. The winner (almost certainly Obama, despite Bittergate and the Wright flap) will assuredly get a significant bounce; whether they’ll keep it is another question.

John McCain has re-hired Bill McInturff and his team at Public Opinion Strategies to conduct his polling.

Sen. John McCain, still rebuilding his presidential campaign after last summer’s near-bankruptcy and staff upheaval, has re-enlisted respected veteran Bill McInturff as his pollster.

McInturff, co-founder of the Republican firm Public Opinion Strategies, has been the Arizona senator’s pollster since the early 1990s and worked on his celebrated but short-lived 2000 Republican presidential-nomination campaign against George W. Bush. He was an early adviser to McCain’s 2008 campaign, but left last September when the candidate, broke, suspended polling through at least February.

Now that McCain has fought back to be the nominee, money is coming in and he is mobilizing a national campaign while Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama fight on for the Democratic nomination. McInturff’s move means he no longer will be the Republican co-director of the Wall Street Journal/NBC News polls with Democratic pollster Peter Hart. A partner at Mr. Hart’s firm, Geoff Garin, recently joined Clinton’s campaign and this week became a chief strategist.

Whether McCain will actually listen to polling advice is an open question.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out again that my wife is the Chief Operating Officer at Public Opinion Strategies. She runs the ops side of the business (human resources, information technology, physical plant, etc.) and isn’t involved in polling, aside from running some occasional dial groups.

The re-establishment of the McCain-POS relationship will have no impact on OTB’s coverage of the campaign. I’ve been critical of McCain and other POS clients quite often over the years. In terms of the likely McCain-Obama matchup in the Fall, barring major developments, I’ll continue to prefer McCain over either of the Democrats but analyze developments on an as-I-see-’em basis. And, of course, Alex and perhaps other co-bloggers will support Obama but provide fair analysis as well.

CBS plans to oust Katie Couric from the anchor chair of the “Evening News” soon after the election, Rebecca Dana reports for WSJ.

After two years of record-low ratings, both CBS News executives and people close to Katie Couric say that the “CBS Evening News” anchor is likely to leave the network well before her contract expires in 2011 — possibly soon after the presidential inauguration early next year.

[...]

Adding to the pressure on CBS to improve the newscast is the faltering performance of CBS’s prime-time schedule and CBS Corp. itself. CBS’s stock price has slumped in recent months amid questions about the company’s growth potential. Its broadcast network is a key revenue source for CBS — more so than for most media companies, which tend to have a wider array of assets.

[...]

One possible new job for Ms. Couric: succeeding Larry King at CNN. Mr. King, who is 74 years old, has a contract with the network into 2009. CNN President Jon Klein, a CBS veteran with close ties to some at the network, has expressed admiration for Ms. Couric’s work, and the two are friends. They had lunch in late January, and the anchor attended Mr. Klein’s birthday party in March. Time Warner Inc.’s CNN said, “Larry King is a great talent who consistently delivers the highest profile guests, and we have no plans to make a change.” Through a publicist, Mr. King declined to comment. Mr. King’s talk-show slot at CNN might be a better fit than evening-newscast anchor for Ms. Couric, who is 51. She made her reputation as a skilled interviewer when she was an anchor at the “Today” show on General Electric Co.’s NBC network.

CBS Chief Executive Les Moonves lured Ms. Couric to CBS with promises that the staid “CBS Evening News,” once anchored by Walter Cronkite, would be remade in a format more suited to her skills. He vowed to dedicate more money to the broadcast and to build up its Web presence. People close to Ms. Couric complain that the network didn’t follow through on all those promises.

When she started on the show in September 2006, Ms. Couric incorporated longer interviews, occasionally conducted in front of a fireplace, and chatty asides into the broadcast. For the first few days, curiosity drove more than 10 million viewers to tune in, but in the months that followed, Ms. Couric’s ratings plummeted to a low for the broadcast, bottoming out to around five million in the spring of 2007 — well below the seven million viewers the show was drawing before Ms. Couric’s arrival.

Since then, the network has scaled back its ambitions drastically, returning to a traditional format. Ratings have ticked up modestly, but Ms. Couric’s show is still placing a distant third. For the week of March 31, the “CBS Evening News” drew an average of 5.9 million viewers. By contrast, NBC’s “Nightly News With Brian Williams” drew 8.3 million viewers and ABC’s “World News With Charles Gibson” drew eight million.

All three broadcast-network evening newscasts have been losing viewers for years. In 2007, the total audience for NBC’s “Nightly News,” ABC’s “World News” and CBS’s “Evening News” was 23 million, a 5% drop from 2006, according to Nielsen Media Research.

CBS is in a particularly difficult situation because its affiliate TV station group is weaker than those of other broadcast networks, a result of the loss of some of its strongest affiliates to News Corp.’s Fox network in 1993 after Fox outbid CBS for the right to air National Football League’s NFC games. (Last year, News Corp. bought Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal.)

While I always thought the perky Couric a poor choice for Walter Cronkite’s old job, she was in an untenable position. She took over a third place network that was beset with scandal and which had serious capital and infrastructure disadvantages compared to its competitors. That’s not a good position from which to work miracles, which is what she was expected to do.

Then again, it’s hard to feel to sorry for her. She’s made an amazingly high salary over the years and was given a shot at the most prestigious job in network news. And, certainly, Larry King’s slot would be a soft landing.

Barack Obama has denounced his pastor of twenty years, the man who performed his wedding ceremony, baptized his children, and served as the inspiration for his best-selling book, because his inflammatory comments got picked up in the press and caused him some political embarrassment.

In the handful of years Senator Barack Obama has spent in the national spotlight, his stance toward his pastor has gone from glowing praise to growing distance to — as of Friday — strong criticism. On Friday, Mr. Obama called a grab bag of statements by his longtime minister, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., “inflammatory and appalling.” “I reject outright the statements by Rev. Wright that are at issue,” he wrote in a campaign statement that was his strongest in a series of public disavowals of his pastor’s views over the past year.

Earlier in the week, several television stations played clips in which Mr. Wright, of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, referred to the United States as the “U.S. of K.K.K. A.” and said the Sept. 11 attacks were a result of corrupt American foreign policy. On Friday, Senator John McCain’s campaign forwarded to reporters an article in The Wall Street Journal in which Mr. Wright was quoted as saying, “Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run,” and accusing the United States of importing drugs, exporting guns and training murderers. Later in the day, Rush Limbaugh dwelled on Mr. Wright in his radio program, calling him “a race-baiter and a hatemonger.”

In the statement he released a few hours later, Mr. Obama, known for his uplifting messages about national unity, professed a certain innocence about his pastor’s most incendiary messages. “The statements that Rev. Wright made that are the cause of this controversy were not statements I personally heard him preach while I sat in the pews of Trinity or heard him utter in private conversation,” he said.

[...]

Mr. Wright, 66, who last month fulfilled longstanding plans to retire, is a beloved figure in African-American Christian circles and a frequent guest in pulpits around the country. Since he arrived at Trinity in 1972, he has built a 6,000-member congregation through his blunt, charismatic preaching, which melds detailed scriptural analysis, black power, Afrocentrism and an emphasis on social justice; Mr. Obama praised the last quality in Friday’s statement.

His most powerful influence, said several ministers and scholars who have followed his career, is black liberation theology, which interprets the Bible as a guide to combating oppression of African-Americans. He attracts audiences because of, not in spite of, his outspoken critiques of racism and inequality, said Dwight Hopkins, a professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School, in an interview last year.

[...]

In the interview last spring, Mr. Wright expressed frustration at the breach in relationship with Mr. Obama, saying the candidate had already privately said that he might need to distance himself from his pastor. But perhaps the two could repair things, said Mr. Wright, pointing out that Mr. Obama’s opponent, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, had faced worse. “At least there are no semen stains on any dresses,” Mr. Wright said, one of several digs he has taken at the Clintons. “That kind of frankness scares people in the campaign,” he added.

Wright strikes me as a nut but Obama’s pretense at being shocked by his rhetoric at this point is shameful. One doesn’t throw friends and mentors under the bus for the sake of convenience.

My strong sense is that Obama does indeed reject most of the outlandish things that Wright says for much the same reason that I do: Educated people who grew up in the post-segregation era simply think differently. My guess — and it’s just that — is that Obama was able to sit in Wright’s pews and reject the hateful framing of issues because he understood that black men of a certain age harbor a deep distrust of white society. One presumes, too, that the railing against whitey was a relatively small part of the message and that Wright preached it as part of a larger message of self-reliance and the need to take care of one another.

I understand why Obama felt he needed to distance himself from Wright, just as he needed to do so with Samantha Power and Hillary Clinton had to with Geraldine Ferraro. There’s a certain ruthless discipline that’s required of executive leaders and one doesn’t want subordinates to derail the focus on the larger mission. Personal loyalty can go too far, as President Bush has aptly demonstrated, but it’s also admirable.

I’m in full agreement with James Carville on this one: This game of “political hari-kiri” needs to stop.

The problem is that calls for resignation are becoming cries of “wolf” in US politics today. Every time one campaign’s surrogate says something mildly offensive about the other candidate, resignation calls are swift.

[...]

This sort of hyper-sensitivity diminishes everyone who engages in it, both the candidates and the media. Politics is a rough and tumble business, and yet there seems to be an effort by the commentariat to sanitise American politics to some type of high-level Victorian debating society.

[...]

It is not the attacks that are unprecedented; it is the shocked reaction to them. I think back to the 1992 Bill Clinton campaign, in which I played a role. The morning after the New Hampshire primary, Paul Begala, my colleague, began belittling the victory of Senator Paul Tsongas by arguing that Mr Clinton’s comeback was a much bigger story. In doing so, Mr Begala called Mr Tsongas a “son of a bitch”. Mr Clinton asked him to write an apology note but also requested that it not affect his aggressiveness. The story lasted one day.

Later in the campaign, my then girlfriend and now wife Mary Matalin called my client “a philandering, pot-smoking draft dodger”. Naturally, someone made a perfunctory call for her to resign which got nowhere, and we all got a good laugh and moved on.

Near the end of that campaign, George H.W. Bush, the president, boldly asserted of Mr Clinton and Al Gore that “my dog Millie knows more about foreign affairs than these two bozos”. Thank God nobody asked Mr Bush to resign. Life as we knew it went along quite nicely because it was all part of that entertaining, rough and tumble endeavour we know as politics.

It has always been that way. In the late 1950s, Earl Long, the then governor of my home state of Louisiana and in my view its most courageous politician since the second world war, referred to one of his political enemies as “nothing but a little pissant”. Or consider the election of 1828, in which surrogates for John Quincy Adams called Andrew Jackson’s wife a bigamist and his mother a prostitute. And that was before television.

Maybe somebody should have resigned for that. But that is where we have lost perspective. Some comments are within bounds, while some are not. But by whining about every little barb, candidates are trying to win the election through a war of staff resignation attrition and Americans are losing the ability to distinguish between what is fair game and what is not.

[...]

Politics is a messy business, but campaigning prepares you for governing. It prepares you to get hit, stand strong and, if necessary, hit back. So our candidates need to buck up, toughen up and recognise that time spent whining and sniping is time not spent addressing the real concerns of the people.

Well said.

Barring some radical happenings between now and November, I’m not going to be voting for Barack Obama. But I’d have been perfectly happy had he come out and said, “I’ve known Jeremiah Wright for twenty years and love him like a father. He’s a good man who says some things that I strongly disagree with but he’s preaching larger truths that I applaud.” Or, “Samantha Power is a brilliant woman who said something stupid in the heat of battle. Neither she nor I think Hillary Clinton is a ‘monster.’ I’d be proud to have her in my administration.”

Smart, decent people occasionally say dumb, hurtful things. Do we really want to limit public service to people who have never said anything interesting?

If you look at the following headlines from just the last 24 hours:

• “Most Economists in Survey Say Recession is Already Here”, Wall Street Journal

• “Southland Home Prices Tumble Fast”, Los Angeles Times

• “Betting the Bank”, Paul Krugman op-ed in NYT

• “Investors Flock to a Classic Refuge, Propelling Its Price Past $1000”, New York Times

it’s hard to conclude that things aren’t going somewhat wobbly with our economy or, at the very least, very considerable efforts are being made to convince us that’s the case.

Ray Fair’s econometric model of quadrennial election results, based on just three variables, growth, inflation, and “good news”, provides empirical support for the 1992 Clinton campaign slogan, “It’s the Economy, Stupid”. Given the sagging economy or the perception of a sagging economy and barring some calamity it will be that much more difficult for a Republican candidate in November.

Note that I’m not making any observations here about the objective capability of either of the prospective Democrats to do anything about the economy, merely suggesting that we keep our eyes on the economy as an indicator and that, as I noted in my post on the economy this morning, perceptions matter.