WSJ Story Sunk By Colossal Asterisk

Continuing to bulldoze the wall between opinion and reporting, today’s Wall Street Journal uses its news pages to advance its editors’ crusade against campaign finance regulation and to stir up sympathy for the poor conservatives it — incredibly — believes are getting the short end of the big-money stick. To all those good-government types concerned that super PACs would inject unprecedented buckets of cash into the 2012 election, the WSJ offers this wisdom: Don’t worry your pretty little heads. “So far, these super PACs are looking less than super,” reporter Neil King Jr. writes. “But signs are few that super PACs have had the major impact that both supporters and critics predicted.” The gloating subtext: Boy, were you liberals stupid to get so upset over nothing. Outside spending, in the Murdochian reality, isn’t a problem at all. In fact, it hardly amounts to a hill of beans, as demonstrated by the Citizens United-fueled super PAC spending binge that never materialized.

It’s not that King doesn’t have a point when he writes that “the flood of spending doesn’t appear to have significantly influenced voter opinion in key states in the presidential contest or in top congressional races.” Indeed, despite the massive independent expenditures that have allowed Republicans to counter the Obama campaign’s fundraising advantage, the president still leads in the swing states, and chances for a GOP takeover of the Senate are slipping away. Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Michigan are three battleground states that super PAC dollars have failed to turn into easy Romney victories. And King correctly cites the Republican primary as perhaps the ultimate super PAC triumph, when outside spending kept Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum in the race past long past their sell-by dates, and when Romney’s goose was ultimately saved by Restore Our Future’s helicopter drops of cash into Florida.

But, by making a case for the futility of super PAC spending, King also sneakily makes the case for the supposedly benign influence of outside spending. If Sheldon Adelson’s millions have had “scant record of success,” then the unlimited spending ushered in by Citizens United must not be so harmful to democracy after all. (For the record, I sort of agree with that contention. But I’m not making that argument in the ostensibly neutral pages of the nation’s most widely-circulated newspaper.)

While it’s true that super PACs have not been the unstoppable financial steamrollers liberals feared, to use this fact as proof of the harmless nature of outside money misses the forest for the trees. What is missing from the WSJ article is an asterisk crucial and weighty enough to sink the Titanic. Outside money — which is predominantly conservative money, as the left’s record of super PAC and non-profit fundraising has been pathetically dismal — hasn’t flowed to super PACs because it has gone instead to 501(c)(4) groups like Crossroads GPS that, unlike American Crossroads (its super PAC counterpart) or the Romney-backing Restore Our Future, don’t have to disclose their donors.

The WSJ serves up this slick graphic to imply that the Obama campaign and its allies have an edge on Romney & Co., even when outside spending by super PACs is factored in.

It’s true that Chicago itself has more readily accessible cash than Romney, especially when one considers that much of the $180 million Republican war chest is sitting in RNC coffers and subject to restrictions that prevent it from spending on the candidate directly. The Romney campaign has only $50.4 million in cash-on-hand, considerably less than the $88 million directly available to Obama. In addition to rules that limit the amount of spending the RNC can coordinate with Boston, the National Journal observes that “money raised through joint committees, for example, is often funneled to state parties to help fund voter-contact efforts. But in that case, the cash can’t be used for TV ads with the potential to shift presidential votes on a large scale.”

The WSJ claims that the massive Republican advantage in super PAC fundraising is barely enough to offset the money pulled in by the Obama campaign and its handful of relatively weak super PACs. Indeed, Obama has been burning through his bank account for precisely this reason; without super PACs to step in, he is more heavily reliant on his own fundraising. Priorities USA, the only Democratic super PAC even attempting to play in the big leagues, raked in $10.1 million in August, outpacing Restore Our Future for the first time. But Priorities is still dwarfed by the myriad groups on the right, and a slow start to fundraising has hampered its effectiveness: In all of 2011, it took in only $4.3 million, a sharp contrast to the $30.1 million haul by Restore Out Future. And American Crossroads and its brethren continue to outpace smaller liberal groups.

But looking only at campaign and super PAC resources misses the real source of conservative cash: 501(4)c’s. These non-profits, which are not obligated to disclose their donors to the FEC, are the real London Whales of campaign finance. ProPublica offers this astounding piece of information:

Two conservative nonprofits, Crossroads GPS and Americans for Prosperity, have poured almost $60 million into TV ads to influence the presidential race so far, outgunning all super PACs put together, new spending estimates show.

By contrast, the super PACs that the Journal paints as the only big spenders in the race outside of the campaigns — and which it suggests have not emerged as the evil influence-peddlers Democrats predicted — have coughed up a total of $55.7 million. The parties themselves? A paltry $22.5 million. ProPublica again:

Crossroads GPS, or Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, is the brainchild of GOP strategist Karl Rove, and spent an estimated $41.7 million. Americans for Prosperity, credited with helping launch the Tea Party movement, is backed in part by billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch, and spent an estimated $18.2 million.

The ProPublica story even comes with its own chart, which nicely counters the WSJ fallacy that all outside spending is super PAC spending.

This hardly comes as a surprise. Though liberals have latched onto the Stephen Colbert narrative of the conservative super PAC bogeyman, the big money has always been in “dark money” groups like Crossroads GPS that can conceal the sources of their donations. The Citizens United and SpeechNow rulings opened the door to unlimited independent expenditures by corporations, but it’s not hard to understand why relatively few businesses have taken up Justice Scalia’s offer. Image-conscious CEOs are reluctant to associate their brands with the politically radioactive agendas (environmental deregulation, homophobic “pro-marriage” legislation, tax cuts for the wealthy) and rhetoric (“Obama is a socialist!”) of outfits like Americans for Prosperity. Most millionaires aren’t as forthcoming about their intentions to spend the president out of office as Sheldon Adelson or the Koch brothers — and they certainly won’t be encouraged by that trio’s constant whining about government “retaliation” and “intimidation” for their activities. (Note to Adelson: If you want the government off your back, try not breaking laws against bribing officials in Macao.) 501(4)(c)s are immensely more appealing; no one ever has to know which causes you favor or which candidates you back.

It’s worth noting that, while conservatives are busy minimizing the impact of super PACs, the left deliberately exaggerates their effect. An alarmist headline on Slate contends that “78 Percent of Outside Spending Tied to Citizens United,” but the truth is more nuanced. The Sunlight Foundation report referenced in the article cites a scarily large number — $272 million in super PAC spending alone, plus another $93 million from trade associations and non-profits — but it turns out the bulk of that $272 million has been spent not on the presidential campaign but on individual Senate and House races. Somewhat incongruously, reporter Andrew McCarthy admits that “the most recent data suggests that outside groups are increasingly spending their cash on Senate and House races, while the amount directed at the top of the ballot has declined,” then makes two major errors. Not only does McCarthy contradict himself, writing that “most of the money amassed by the major super PACs has been put toward negative advertising in the presidential election” (emphasis mine), but he misrepresents the Sunlight Foundation’s findings. The next sentence, which claims that “in total, $131.1 million has been spent in opposition to President Obama,” implies that this money was spent by “major super PACs.” Follow the provided link, however, and it turns out that $131.1 million is the total independent expenditures, a category which includes not just super PAC dollars but money from the Republican National Committee (which was obviously bankrolling political ads long before Citizens United) and non-profits like Crossroads GPS. By conflating these disparate types of groups, McCarthy makes super PACs seem bigger and badder than they actually are. In fact, out of the top four big spenders, each of which has dropped $25 to $30 million on ads opposing the president, two — Americans for Prosperity and the RNC — aren’t super PACs at all. So half of the roughly $100 million spent by the top four groups had nothing to do with Citizens United. (Strangely, the Sunlight Foundation reports Crossroads GPS as having spent only $7 million; it’s not entirely clear why this number is so different from ProPublica’s figures, as even when non-presidential spending is factored in, Sunlight’s total of $18 million is nowhere close to ProPublica’s $41 million stat for presidential race spending alone.)

It is a cliche to say that the truth often lies somewhere between the extremes, but in this case the old saw seems to hold true. The WSJ suffers from serious confirmation bias when it plays into the conservative argument that, just because super PACs have proved to be more game-tweakers than game-changers, outside money has had little effect on the campaign. But Slate goes too far in the opposite direction by claiming that super PACs are steamrolling the poor Democrats, who have mustered only $50.7 million to attack Mitt Romney. One could even see Slate’s deception as more deliberately mendacious, as McCarthy makes patently false statements about the numbers from the Sunlight Foundation, while the WSJ only lies by omission.

To his credit, New York Magazine’s Frank Rich is one liberal who acknowledges that the WSJ has a point about the relative impotence of super PAC money. While writers at American Prospect and The Nation continue to gnash their teeth and rend their clothes over the Stephen Colbert bogeymen, Rich admits that “It may turn out that many, including me, were more worried about the post–Citizens United wave of money from the Kochs and Adelsons than we had to be,” though according to Rich this is only because Romney has been such a weak candidate. Unfortunately, by calling the WSJ piece “most important political story so far this week” because “it cites example after example of pro-Romney super-PAC expenditures failing to get the job done,” he commits the same errors as Murdoch’s Journal minions: he ignores the 501(4)(c) sources of real “dark money.” In their desire to cast super PACs in the most convenient partisan light, both the left and right miss the real ten-ton gorillas in the room: the non-profits, whose political spending turns their tax-exempt status as “social welfare” organizations into a cruel joke. Those groups, masquerading as do-gooders and non-partisan defenders of “American values” (capitalism, religion, free markets — take your pick), are more dangerous to democracy than anything spawned by Citizens United.

Further Media Miscellany

 

The Latest Slut-Gate Developments

Pigs must be flying, because professional provocateur Rush Limbaugh has done the unthinkable: issued an apology for referring to Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown University student who testified before a Congressional panel about insurance coverage for birth control, as a “slut” and a “prostitute.” His rant, which he concluded by demanding that Fluke (whose first name he can’t even get right) post her sex videos online for the taxpayers’ viewing pleasure:

What does it say about the college co-ed Susan Fluke, who goes before a Congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex, what does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex. What does that make us? We’re the pimps. The johns.

Naturally, the apology is technically a non-apology: “In this instance, I chose the wrong words in my analogy of the situation. I did not mean a personal attack on Ms. Fluke.”

In what reality is calling someone a “slut” not a personal attack? Try greeting your boss on Monday with “Good morning, you slut!” Hey, it’s not personal, it’s just business.

Unbelievably, Mitt Romney’s response to the incident was actually worse than that of Rick Santorum, who at least acknowledged that Limbaugh was “being absurd.” (Though Santorum then excused the behavior by claiming, “an entertainer can be absurd.”) Asked about Limbaugh’s remarks during a campaign event, Romney said, “I’ll just say this, which is it’s not the language I would have used.”

Seriously? What language would Romney have chosen instead? “Whore” instead of “slut”? “Hooker” instead of “prostitute”? Maybe “floozy” or “tramp” have been less offensive.

Out of all the media reactions to Limbaugh’s insults, that of Jennifer Rubin, a conservative blogger for the Washington Post, was perhaps most bizarre. Rubin, who regularly issues demands for President Obama to denounce ostensibly “anti-Semitic” remarks from figures so loosely associated with the White House that their only connection to Obama is the term “liberal,” declined to comment on the odious comments from an extremist in her own party. When asked for comment, Rubin wrote: “Needless to say I don’t respond to faux journalists, and I have nothing to say about a radio talk show host’s comments.”

Funny, because she has something to say about everything else under the sun. Equally humorous is the denunciation of “faux journalists” by someone whose greatest journalistic exploits include linking to various conservative websites and opining about Obama “throwing Israel under the bus.” Journalism usually entails first-hand reporting, not just tossing out opinions from behind a computer monitor. If Jennifer Rubin is a real journalist, then I am Walter Cronkite.

Also provoking eye-rolling is the response of Limbaugh’s advertisers. Quicken Loans and Sleep Train Mattresses both pulled their ads, and Pro Flowers tweeted, “We would like to assure you that we do not endorse the views expressed by Rush Limbaugh.” All I can say is, these companies are fleeing from Limbaugh’s program now? So . . . when the radio host told a black viewer to “take that bone out of your nose and call me back,” that wasn’t offensive enough? When he called the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib “sort of like hazing, a fraternity prank, sort of like that kind of fun,” that wasn’t sufficiently repulsive? And when Limbaugh repeatedly played a song called “Barack the Magic Negro,” that wasn’t grounds for advertisers to go elsewhere?

Too little, too late, folks.

We Just Make Stuff Up

Wendy Kaminer at The Atlantic confirms what I’ve been banging on about for awhile: that the NYT is running a deliberate  campaign of deception about Citizens United, the Supreme Court ruling that allowed corporations to make unlimited political donations.

In news stories as well as columns, it has repeatedly mischaracterized Citizens United, explicitly or implicitly blaming it for allowing unlimited “super PAC” contributions from mega-rich individuals . . . . When I first focused on the inaccurate reference to Citizens United in a front-page story about Sheldon Adelson, I assumed it was a more or less honest if negligent mistake. But mistakes about Citizens United are beginning to look more like propaganda, because even after being alerted to its misstatements, the Times has continued to repeat them.

This topic also puts me in the unusual position of agreeing with the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which takes on the myth — promoted not only by the Times but by President Obama and the Stephen Colbert/Jon Stewart tag team as well — that super PACs, the spawn of Citizens United, are funded by “dark money” from anonymous donors.

But if the problem is billionaires supposedly buying elections in secret, why do we keep hearing about the well-heeled patrons supporting Super PACs? Sheldon Adelson and Foster Friess by now are nearly household names.

The reason we know who these people are is that Super PACs are required by law to file disclosure reports with the Federal Election Commission. There are other political groups organized under section 501(c)4 of the tax code that don’t disclose their donors. But most of them are traditional political nonprofits like the National Rifle Association, AARP, the Club for Growth, Planned Parenthood and hundreds of others that have never opened their books. If the goal is transparency, Super PACs are an improvement.

Arthur Brisbane, the Times’ public editor, addressed critics like Kaminer in a March 2 column. He essentially defends the paper’s treatment of the Citizens United decision, conceding only that perhaps articles should also mention F.E.C. vs. SpeechNow, the court case that built on Citizens United and permitted wealthy individuals like Adelson to donate unlimited amounts to independent groups (super PACs). He writes that “framing this as a Citizens United-derived phenomenon without referring to SpeechNow has the effect of laying all blame for individual spending at the feet of Citizens United. That’s not accurate.”True, but arguing over the semantics — over which court decision to cite — misses the point entirely. The real problem with the Times’ coverage is that it refers to recent court decisions at all. The ability of wealthy individuals to sink unlimited sums into politics goes a long way back; SpeechNow just set up super PACs as the latest vehicle for that spending. Super PACs have certainly greased the wheels of independent donations, making it easier for millionaires to inject money into politics without directly hiring oppo researchers or TV producers, but non-profits (which have long been allowed to accept unlimited donations) did a pretty good job filling that role in 2008 and 2010. Brisbane’s column — a mea culpa without much culpa — just gives the Times a green light to continue the obfuscation.

Freudian Slips for Wonks

In his Feb. 24 column, Paul Krugman homed in on what has come to be known as a “Kinsley gaffe” (for columnist Michael Kinsley) in which politician inadvertently tells the truth. As the latest example, Krugman points to Mitt Romney’s remarks to the conservative Club for Growth in Michigan:

Speaking in Michigan, Mr. Romney was asked about deficit reduction, and he absent-mindedly said something completely reasonable: “If you just cut, if all you’re thinking about doing is cutting spending, as you cut spending you’ll slow down the economy.” A-ha. So he believes that cutting government spending hurts growth, other things equal.

Oops. Of course, the Romney campaign quickly walked that one back, but the damage — if one can call a flash of lucidity damaging — was done. Less noticed but perhaps more satisfying for anti-austerity Krugmanites, is the following line from a Wall Street Journal editorial, “The Tragic Greek Sideshow.”

Under the burden of debt and austerity policies, the Greek economy won’t recover for years.

This, from the greatest media proponent of a balanced budget amendment? From the same editors who praise Romney’s tax plan for slashing spending to below 20% of GDP? From the folks who insist that the the European financial crisis is the direct result of lavish welfare states and bloated governments? Austerity, tax cuts, lower spending: these things are meant to goose the economy by spurring private investment. They are supposed to be panaceas for all variety of economic ills, not “burdens.” Is the Wall Street Journal admitting that the link between downsized government and mounting riches is as mythical as Krugman’s famous “confidence fairy”?

A Kinsley gaffe, indeed.

Where Credit Is Due

In other WSJ-related news, the paper continues its tradition of stinginess in giving credit to others. After The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg scored a major 45-minute interview with President Obama on Israel and Iran, most media outlets led with Obama’s most quotable statement: “I don’t bluff.” The Times noted the source of Obama’s remarks — and linked to the interview itself — by the fourth paragraph of its article: “Mr. Obama’s remarks, in a 45-minute interview with The Atlantic magazine this week, were intended to reinforce a sense of solidarity between the United States and Israel . . . .” The Atlantic gets credit in the second and third paragraphs of the relevant AP article. The Washington Post, which also drew on other administration sources for its report on the upcoming Obama-Netanyahu meeting, nevertheless name-checked and linked to the magazine on the first page of its article.

The Journal, despite using the “I don’t bluff” quotation in the first sentence of its article, neglects to mention its source until halfway through the piece: “White House officials said the president previewed his speech in an interview released Friday.” Particularly classless is the fact that the Journal credits itself even earlier, writing that “The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that the White House was considering using the AIPAC speech to set a more forceful tone on potential of military action.” This sort of self-promotion is more characteristic of the AP’s series on NYPD surveillance of Muslims, which never misses a chance to throw in a sentence like “Revealed here for the first time . . . .” or “Previously undisclosed documents obtained exclusively by the AP . . . .” Yes, journalists work hard. Some just feel more entitled to blow their own horns — while minimizing the achievements of colleagues — than others.

More Lies (NYT, you’re breaking my heart)

Twice in as many days, the New York Times has made assertions that it almost certainly knows are false. In both cases, there is ample evidence that the newspaper has access to the correct facts, yet deliberately chooses to obscure them. And in both cases, the misstatements — actually, we might as well just call them “lies” — reinforce the conservative stereotype of the Times as a liberal paper that injects ideology into its news articles. I would usually be the first to defend the Times against charges of bias, as nine out of ten articles are written with studied objectivity, but the last two days have been disappointing.

First, as I complained in a previous post, the Times has continued its practice of referring to Mitt Romney’s 15% tax rate as higher than the effective rate of a middle-income earner. Now, the paper again makes a claim that has been pointed out as a fallacy. In an article describing the Adelson family’s multi-million-dollar donations to Winning Our Future, a super PAC supporting Newt Gingrich, reporter Nicholas Confessore mischaracterizes the Citizens United decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment permits corporations and unions to make unlimited donations to independent political committees. While Citizens United certainly changed campaign finance rules, it played no role in the Adelsons’ ability to donate $10 million to Winning Our Future. The $5,000 limit on private citizens’ donations to PACs was lifted by a federal appeals court ruling, SpeechNow.org vs. FEC. That decision indeed drew on Citizens United, but even prior to the SpeechNow ruling, wealthy individuals hoping to influence politics had a smorgasboard of options.

Anyone with a spare $10 million could give unlimited amounts to “issue-oriented” 527 groups, named for the section of the tax code that regulates them, as early as the 2004 election. Though technically prohibited from endorsing or criticizing a specific candidate, these organizations predictably blurred the line between “issues advocacy” and advocacy on behalf of a candidate. After all, if you can air an ad calling pro-choice politicians baby-killers, and the only pro-choicer in the race is the Democrat . . . . why bother naming names? Certain charities — 501(c)(4)s — could also accept unlimited (and anonymous) donations prior to Citizens United, as long as their “primary purpose” was not political. The Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, as well as Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, which were tossing around millions long before super PACs arrived on the scene, walked right up to the 49% “political” limit in 2010.

Deep-pocketed donors have had a hand on the scales of democracy since before I was born. Yet the Times writes: “The Adelsons’ contributions on Mr. Gingrich’s behalf illustrate how rapidly a new era of unlimited political money is reshaping the rules of presidential politics and empowering individual donors to a degree unseen since before the Watergate scandals.”A paragraph later, the paper explains the ramifications of “the emergence of new campaign finance rules in the wake of the Supreme Court’s landmark Citizens United ruling”:

That decision paved the way for super PACs, including the kind that have spent more than $30 million in the Republican primary so far: political committees run by each candidate’s former aides and financed by a few wealthy supporters. Because they are technically independent of the candidate, the groups can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money, rendering less relevant the limits that Congress imposed in the 1970s on contributions to candidates . . . . But critics warn that the new rules have reopened avenues for the very wealthy to exert undue influence over campaigns and candidates.

Citizens United indeed reopened avenues for corporations and unions to exert such influence, but the decision said nothing about wealthy individuals like the Adelsons. Is it really that tough for the Times to cite the correct court case? Also unsupported is the implication that corporate donations have been a game-changer in this election cycle. Because many super PACs have altered their disclosure schedules to allow them to delay publishing their donor lists until January 31, there is no way of knowing whether big businesses are behind the recent spending. Are corporations and unions really financing slimy attack ads, or are the bulk of the super PAC funds coming from individuals? Considering the general level of nastiness, I’ll be curious to see if any big-name corporations indeed donated to Winning Our Future and its ilk. When Target gave money to a politician who opposed gay marriage, an Internet backlash ensued. Will corporations really put their cash behind movies like “When Bain Came to Town,” the anti-Romney production that skewered capitalism?

What really gets me, however, is that the Times knows exactly what Citizens United did and did not allow. On Jan. 16, it published a letter to the editor from a lawyer involved in Citizens United that pointed out the very inaccuracies Confessore repeats in his Jan. 23 article. The lawyer, Floyd Abrams, cites two articles that blame Citizens United for enabling “a wealthy individual to influence an election.” In any other context, I would probably loathe Abrams, who works for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. But I happen to agree with him on the First Amendment. Free speech isn’t always pretty or polite, but it’s the bedrock of the Constitution — and like it or not, in today’s world, speech without funding is so quiet as to be meaningless. Abrams makes a valid point, and does so in fewer words than I have spent haranguing the Times:

The Citizens United case does not deal with “wealthy individuals” at all . . . . The Citizens United case dealt with a different subject — the rights of corporations and unions to participate fully in the political process.

Abrams concludes that “Citizens United’s defense of First Amendment values remains highly controversial, but it is important to bear in mind precisely what it is about.”

Amen.