Catching up, a little

The flu came to town last week and the paper has been frantically on the story ever since.

At any journalism outfit, stories like this will highlight the tension between those trying to figure out what readers need and those trying to figure out what readers want (as in what it is that makes readers want to buy a paper). During a flu outbreak, this tension manifests itself as a tug-of-war between the Don't Panic and the Panic! factions.

The best example of what I mean by the Panic! faction would be the local TV news in most American markets. And most especially the teasers and promos for that local TV news, which become the frame that shapes and directs and characterizes all of the reporting forced to fit into that frame. These teasers are shown throughout the night in between local-market commercials, and also throughout the news broadcast, in between the stories themselves. "Something threatens the lives of your children, tonight at 11."

This sensationalistic approach has been thoroughly mocked, criticized and argued against elsewhere (well, it hasn't quite been thoroughly mocked — there's always room for more mockery …) and we needn't rehash all of that debate here. I simply want to question one of the assumptions of the way this debate is framed.

The assumption is that the Panic! faction is more interested in selling newspapers than the Don't Panic faction is. I don't believe that. Actually, I seem to recall reading somewhere that the success of the best-selling book of all time could be attributed, in part, to the words "Don't Panic" appearing in large, reassuring letters on the cover. I may be wrong, but I think most readers would rather be informed than be alarmed. Offering to keep them informed strikes me as a sustainable business model. Offering to keep them alarmed, not so much.

Anyway, while I was busy at work reminding readers to wash their hands, I neglected this space and thus skipped past several other news items from the past week. Let's catch up on a couple of those.

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Who invited Arlen?

I appreciate the cloture arithmetic that makes 60 senators caucusing with the Democrats some kind of magic bullet, er, magic number. (And I won't even complain about the nonsense of that — about the ridiculousness of a bunch of lazy scoundrels who think a real filibuster is just too much work, so instead they all agree to replace it with a bit of procedural nonsense to create a dubious, extra-constitutional three-fifths majority requirement for all Senate votes.)

But this is Arlen Specter, we're talking about here. I've voted against this man three times and I'm proud to have done so.

I kept that "Joe Hoeffel for Senate" sticker on my car for years as a badge of honor. In 1992, I went door-to-door for Lynn Yeakel. In 1998, I convincingly feigned excitement over the campaign of Bob Lloyd. (What? Oh, sorry — Bill Lloyd. Whoever. He was running against Specter, that was all that mattered.)

I was very much looking forward to voting against Arlen Specter for a fourth time in 2010. It's quite disturbing to learn that my own party doesn't want me to do that — that they think voting for Specter might be the best and only chance of stopping the electoral juggernaut of Pat Toomey's toomescent campaign.

Because here's what really bothers me: If it came down to a choice between Arlen Specter, the embodiment of unprincipled, poll-driven politics, and Pat Toomey, rabid lunatic wingnut — endorsed by both the Club for Hobbesian Anarchy and Ladies Against Women, then I'm going to vote for Specter. So are most Pennsylvanians. And that would mean that Specter wins — not just the election, but the ongoing argument over what politics is or ought to be about.

Specter is what he is — a human windsock. With few, if any, actual convictions, opinions or principles of his own, the man is in some ways more responsive to his constituents than most politicians. He's kind of like the third accountant in the old joke:

But that same flexibility and variability means that such responsiveness can't be relied on, and that it doesn't bring a lot of force to bear in support of those constituents. He'll say whatever polls indicate most voters want him to say and he'll vote however most voters want him to vote — but only if or to the extent that doing so isn't likely to cost him politically. Every tepid stance he takes seems conditional, provisional, temporary.

That hasn't won Specter much in terms of admiration or respect — I've never heard anyone here in Pennsylvania speak fondly of our senior senator — but it seems to have been a successful approach to ensuring his lifetime job security in public office. That's a depressingly impressive achievement for a man who achieved prominence by reassuring the public that Ira Einhorn was not a flight risk.

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Former quarterback, congressman and HUD Secretary Jack Kemp died this week.

I liked Jack Kemp. I didn't like his policies — his devout, one-size-fits-all prescription of supply-side tax cuts was misbegotten, demonstrably false and disastrous wherever implemented.

But I admired the man himself because he spoke and stood against the xenophobic and racist factions in his own party and because he never accepted that appealing to middle-class voters meant pretending that the poor did not exist. Jack Kemp talked about ending poverty during a time when many Democrats, heeding the strategy of "triangulation," were cautiously avoiding any mention of the P-word. Kemp genuinely found poverty intolerable and he wanted to Do Something about it. For that, he earned my respect.

The Something Kemp ultimately wanted to Do, unfortunately, was to implement a trickle-down program of massive tax-cuts for the wealthiest paid for by correspondingly massive cuts in the social safety net and the common welfare — a strategy that would have resulted in a dramatic increase in the number of Americans living in poverty and in the hardships such poverty would entail. So while I admire Kemp's sincere dedication to aiding the poor, I'm also grateful he never had the opportunity to administer the toxic prescription he had in mind for them.

In a hypothetical campaign pitting Kemp against Specter, then, I suppose Kemp would have won my admiration and Specter would have won my vote. Democracy isn't always pretty.