Vanity In Progress

The Case of Tom DeLay: Corruption, Democratic Norms, and Electoral Survival

2007-11-24T18:14:00.000-08:00

This paper was written in my Political Corruption seminar class my senior year. The professor whose class I wrote this paper for was one of the two who recommended me to both The New School and NYU.

The Case of Tom DeLay:
Corruption, Democratic Norms, and Electoral Survival

"When a man is in trouble or in a good fight, you want to have your friends around, preferably armed. So I feel really good,'' the United States House of Representatives Republican Majority Leader Tom DeLay said in his keynote address to the National Rifle Association’s annual convention in April, 2005.[1] Mr. DeLay’s “trouble” has been mounting. He has been unable to shake the continuing questions into his political activities, beginning with a racketeering lawsuit filed against him by House Democrats in 2000[2] and reaching a crescendo in the spring of 2005.

Although Mr. DeLay has not been indicted or convicted of any of the charges alleged against him – to date only receiving three admonishments from the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct – his actions have not only damaged his reputation and possibly his political future. His ventures into money-laundering, racketeering, and extortion are unique threats to the democratic norms that he should be upholding in his position as a United States Congressman. Whereas corruption is commonly viewed as dealings that personally enrich the corrupt, DeLay’s actions are in service to the protection and consolidation of conservative Republicans’ national political power.

The latest questions about Mr. DeLay’s ethics have involved the funding for various trips he has taken, one paid for by a lobbyist with close ties to the Congressman,[3] another paid for by a registered foreign agent,[4] both in violation of explicit House rules. However, his problematic activities go far beyond the improper access suggested by the inappropriately-funded trips. DeLay has been accused of activities that, if true, are dangerously close to money-laundering, extortion, and influence-peddling. Two of his close associates are under indictment in Texas[5] and, along with a third, are facing civil suits in relation to DeLay-founded Political Action Group Texans for a Republican Majority.[6]

The first section in this paper will deal with general questions about corruption, especially corruption in a democracy. In the second section, some examples of the accusations leveled against the Majority Leader will be outlined, along with their effects on the norms of democratic governance. The third section will deal with the fallout from the ethics allegations, with particular attention to the reputation of the House of Representatives and to Tom DeLay’s electoral future.

Corruption Defined
Corruption can be broadly defined as the “behavior of public officials which deviates from accepted norms in order to serve private ends.”[7] Visions of looters, rent-scrapers, and dividend-collectors[8] in third world countries, as well as corporate cronies in smoke-filled back rooms sharing cigars with politicians in more modern cultures, give an evocatively seedy image to the word. However, there is a perception that democracies are less inherently corrupt than non-democracies, that, according to Susan Rose-Ackerman,

"[t]he desire for re-election constrains the greed of politicians. The protection of civil liberties and free speech, which generally accompanies democratic elections, makes open and transparent government possible. In contrast, non-democratic states are especially susceptible to corrupt incentives because their rulers have the potential to organize government with few checks and balances."[9]

Rose-Ackerman finds, in contrast to this perception, that democracies “do not always succeed in checking corruption....”[10] Often, the need to finance campaigns with private money, as in the United States, entices lawmakers to sell influence in exchange for campaign donations – or at least rewards those who are better at selling out by enabling them to pour more money into their campaigns.

Corruption in a Democratic Context
In assessing corruption, it is important to define what is being corrupted. In other words, if certain actions are corrupt in a democratic context, there must be an ideal that is being degraded. Most definitions of democracy include such concepts as majority rule/minority protection as well as government by the governed, either directly or through freely and fairly elected representatives. Robert Dahl points to common characteristics shared by democracies – the equality of votes that is expressed in the free and just election of officials by effective participation of the governed through inclusive suffrage and the common right to run for elective office, as well as the possibility that citizens can collectively control the political agenda by enlightened comprehension of issues fostered by freedom of expression, access to alternative information sources, and freedom of association.[11] While these characteristics are important in recognizing the attributes of democratic governance, they are simply mechanisms that safeguard the fundamental norm of democracy: the wide diffusion of political power throughout the citizenry of a nation.

In the United States, the political protection of diffuse power is particularly important. In a capitalist economic system, unwilling to tolerate the inefficiencies that may result from purposely equalizing wealth, political equality and access to political power must be guarded jealously. Since “[m]any resources that flow directly or indirectly from one’s position in the economic order can be converted to political resources,”[12] a healthy democracy will systematically guard against supplementing the consolidation of political power that can come from individual wealth. In accepting the inevitable economic inequality that arises in capitalism, democracy is threatened if institutions do not consciously protect the diffusion of political power by promoting the greatest possible opportunities for inclusion in the political process across the population.

Corruption concentrates, rather than diffuses, power in a democracy. Although the common modern definition of corruption is behavioral – the “inappropriate use of common power and authority for purposes of individual or group gain at common expense,”[13] Mark E. Warren maintains that democratic corruption in particular violates the norm of
…inclusion in collective decisions and actions of all affected….the very logic of corruption involves exclusion: the corrupt use their control over resources to achieve gains at the expense of those excluded in collective decision making or organization of collective actions…. “corruption of democracy” is a charge directed against those who derive benefits at the expense of those they exclude from their relationship owing to the imperfect realization of democratic norms. These norms could be better realized were it not for the actions of those who gain from undermining, subverting, or otherwise blocking these norms. For a decision, action, or exchange to count as corrupt, then, it must cause gains for those included in the decision or action and harm for at least some of those who are excluded. The gains may be personal or private…or professional, as when a member of Congress exchanges influence for campaign contributions, enabling his reelection.[14]

While exclusion from meaningful political action is a necessary condition for corruption in the democratic context, it is not the sole qualifier. Since widespread opportunity for meaningful political action is the fundamental norm of democracy, duplicity and harm are also required for an act to be considered corrupt.[15] The claim to inclusion is both “recognized and violated” by a corrupt actor, indicated by his/her need for secrecy, and at least some of the excluded must suffer harm from his actions.[16] An honest legislator will give a fair hearing to all his constituents, giving impartial consideration to their arguments during deliberation according to the merits of their case and to the requirements of sound policy, not according to money or favors given.[17] A corrupt legislator deliberates in secret, providing undue access to the deliberative process to cronies and contributors, and is duplicitous in his speech by maintaining that legislation was crafted according to some acceptable, impartial deliberation rather than by the actual desire to direct benefits to those that have bought inappropriate access.[18]

Mr. DeLay, by his alleged actions, has sought to subvert diffusion of political power, instead using inappropriate means to consolidate power, avoiding the natural checks that come with democracy, protecting himself and his conservative colleagues from true competition by seeking untimely redistricting in Texas in order to pad his party’s margin in Congress, as well as circumventing campaign finance rules in order to fund the strengthening of his position as a leader of the dominant party. The Congressman has used practices that can be characterized as extortion and money laundering to achieve his ends.

Extortion
Many people are confused by extortion "under color of official right." Extortion under color of official right occurs when an agent of the government uses his or her legitimate governmental powers to obtain an illegitimate objective…. a city council member may have the authority to rezone an area of town and thereby effectively put a company out of business, but the council member cannot threaten rezoning unless the company contributes to his re-election campaign.
Jeffrey Earnest Grell
RICOact.com LLC[19]

The Taming of K Street
K Street in Washington, D.C. is the area of the city where the lobbyists from the different trade associations have office space, conveniently close to the Capitol. Before 1994, these lobbyists were Democrats as often as they were Republicans,[20] in order to maximize access no matter which party happened to be in charge – a remarkably pragmatic practice, given business’ natural affinity to Republican policies.

However, since the 1994 Republican takeover of the Congress, and accelerating markedly after George W. Bush’s assumption of the presidency in 2000, the GOP has worked to make over the composition of K Street in its own image.[21] As Tom DeLay said, “If you want to play in our revolution, you have to play by our rules.”[22] Those rules include coercing lobbyists to cut contributions to Democrats. While the Democrats controlled Congress, there was a relative equality of corporate financial support to the two parties, with Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Tony Coelho even tripling his committee’s fundraising during the first two years of the Reagan administration.[23] After Republicans had gained control of Congress, Tom DeLay invited lobbyists to his office to sign off on a list he presented to them, showing the recent political contributions that the different lobbyists had made, positioned in “friendly” and “unfriendly” columns.[24] This list had been compiled by Grover Norquist, leader of the group “Americans for Tax Reform,” from public records.[25] In 2002, just before Republicans took control of the Senate, Hilary Rosen, at the time the president of the Recording Industry Association of America, was told by her new hire, Republican Mitch Glazier, that Grover Norquist’s Wednesday Group had informed him that Rosen was giving too much money to Democrats. “We were all warned that if the Republicans take the Senate, no more money is to go to the Democrats. It was that overt.”[26] To assume that this practice has not had the desired effect would be naïve. Lou Dubose and Jan Reid, two Texas newspapermen who have written The Hammer about Tom DeLay, were told by a “high-dollar” Texas lobbyist, “I can’t talk to you about DeLay. He has people looking at my party affiliation and all my contributions.”[27]

While this practice may be characterized as simply playing hardball politics rather than as extortion, the situation becomes more clear-cut in the case of Dave McCurdy. Mr. McCurdy was a former moderate Democratic Congressman from Oklahoma, as well as a one-term national chair and co-founder of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council.[28] After losing his bid for a vacated Senate seat in 1994, McCurdy was hired as president by Electronic Industries Alliance, a trade organization that had a staff of 260 and an annual budget of $50 million.[29] According to a suit filed by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2000, Congressman DeLay directed a campaign in which members of the House Republican leadership called EIA member companies and urge that McCurdy be fired. At the same time, DeLay used his power as Majority Whip to block pending legislation advocated by EIA, while making it known that the legislation had been stopped because of McCurdy’s hiring. EIA subsequently hired a former House Republican staff member who, shortly after being hired, attended a fundraiser for ARMPAC.[30]

ARMPAC was the Americans for a Republican Majority Political Action Committee that Tom DeLay had founded. The legislation being held hostage was the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that the EIA, as well as a large business coalition, had been working on for more than two years. The bill had broad bipartisan support, putting into practice the guidelines that were laid out in a treaty written by the World Intellectual Property Organization – signed by 128 countries – that would provide more protection against the theft of American computer-generated intellectual property.[31] Only the final House vote on the conference committee report was required before the bill would be sent to President Clinton for his signature.[32]

When EIA stood by its hire of Dave McCurdy, then-Majority Whip DeLay pulled the bill from the House calendar, “making it known that the legislation had been stopped because of McCurdy’s hiring.”[33] Tom DeLay and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich also prohibited any communication between their staffs and anyone from EIA. Facing being cut off from the access that is the life-blood of any lobby, the trade association compromised with Republican leadership by hiring two House-associated Republicans to actually work with Congress.[34] New York Democratic Representative Jerrold Nadler said, “It was outrageous. They pulled a bill off the floor of the House. They took an official action. For what, to coerce a trade association? That meets the legal definition of extortion as I understand it.”[35]

For this rather heavy-handed and overtly extortionist behavior, the House Ethics Committee (officially the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct) issued a private letter to all House members informing them that officials “are prohibited from taking or withholding any official action on the basis of the partisan affiliation or the campaign contributions or support of the involved individuals” as well as threatening punitive action.[36] Democratic House plaintiffs dropped the suit against DeLay.

Mr. DeLay’s behavior goes beyond mere extortion for the purpose of increasing his own or his party’s financial resources. The domestication of K Street indicates an intentional, well-orchestrated effort to consolidate power by denying political access to any player that is not connected to DeLay, either directly or through his cohorts. There is no reason to believe that a Democrat like McCurdy would be less cooperative than a Republican as a lobbyist, given that his continued employment would be contingent upon effective dealings with legislators, not adherence to a Democratic Party line. His interference in the internal business of the trade associations on K Street marks a new aspect of DeLay’s aspiration to exert public control over private enterprise.

Congressman Nick Smith and the Medicare Vote
Mr. DeLay’s extortion efforts are not confined to those individuals outside the Congress. During the vote on the Medicare Reform Bill that included senior citizen prescription drug benefits that George W. Bush felt was imperative for his 2004 reelection bid, it was clear that the bill was going down to defeat due to the recalcitrance of Democrats as well as a few deficit-wary Republicans.[37] During an unprecedented three hour extension of the vote (in 1987, when Democratic Speaker Jim Wright had extended a vote for ten minutes, then-Republican Whip Dick Cheney called it “the greatest abuse of democracy” in his lifetime),[38] DeLay and other Republican House leadership worked on Republicans to change enough votes to pass the measure by a margin of 220-215 votes.[39]

In the aftermath of the arm-twisting, Nick Smith of Michigan, one of the Republicans who voted against the bill, asserted that he had been first bribed, then threatened by other Representatives. Smith’s son, Brad, was poised to run for the seat being vacated by his father’s retirement. In a Michigan newspaper article he wrote after the vote, Smith claimed “unnamed House leaders had promised substantial financial and political support for his son Brad… if Smith would vote aye.”[40] Dan Flynn, a DeLay aide, had contacted a former Smith aide to ascertain the status of Smith’s son’s race (Flynn was found not guilty of violating House rules, but the ethics committee stated that “It is not appropriate for congressional staff to research … congressional contests … to influence a Member’s vote on pending legislation”).[41] DeLay later confirmed that he offered his support for Smith’s son if the dissenter would vote for the measure, testifying before the ethics panel that he told Smith, “I will personally endorse your son. That's my final offer.”[42] The ability of DeLay’s various PACs to focus money on individual races made this a valuable offer. After Smith continued to balk, House Republicans promised to campaign against his son, effectively primarying him out of the seat his father held.

After later repeating the same charges on the radio, Nick Smith recanted his statements[43] and did not cooperate with the investigative subcommittee.[44] Investigators attempted to clear up the matter by viewing C-SPAN tapes of the vote to see who spoke to Smith.[45] However, after the initial fifteen-minute vote, the cameras, usually trained down the middle of the aisle separating Republican and Democratic legislators,[46] was “focused on the Democratic side of the aisle and no videotape record of what the Republican leaders and whips were doing” exists.[47]

C-SPAN cameras are controlled by the House leadership.[48] By moving their focus to the Democrats’ side, the case can be made that the leadership knew that whatever actions they planned to take could, at the very least, give the appearance of impropriety. While “logrolling” (legislators exchanging political support for political favors, referring especially to members of Congress) is not against the rules – just poor legislative practice – threats are. To threaten the future of a man’s son in order to force him to change his vote on a piece of legislation is, at the least, inappropriate. Since they refocused the C-SPAN cameras, the House leadership tacitly indicated they knew the impropriety of their action.

Money Laundering
Texas Criminal Investigation
As demonstrated in the Nick Smith Medicare vote, the other side of extortion is bribery. Tom DeLay’s offer to support Congressman Smith’s son in his campaign was not just a promise of photo opportunities or helpful speeches. Mr. DeLay has built a powerful fundraising machine that has helped him assist the elections of many of the newer members of Congress – members who knew that their election was due in no small part to money and expertise provided by their mentor, Tom DeLay. In helping political neophytes run successful campaigns, DeLay has been able to populate the House with people beholden to his expertise and to the money his organizations control.[49]

In order to have the resources to help those he deems appropriate, Tom DeLay appears to have participated in questionable, and possibly illegal, efforts to circumvent campaign contribution limits. In February, 2005, a civil trial began against Bill Ceverha, treasurer of Texans for a Republican Majority Political Action Committee (TRMPAC).[50] TRMPAC is the PAC that Tom DeLay founded with the goal of establishing a Republican majority in the Texas State House of Representatives for the purpose of redistricting Texas in order to increase Republican representation in the United States House of Representatives.[51] TRMPAC spent $1.5 million in the 2002 Texas elections.[52] Redistricting was a pet project of DeLay’s, having little resonance with the newly-elected House, with major budget problems and a battle over limiting lawsuits higher on their agenda.[53] But after much politicking on his part – as well as further abuse of power in commissioning the Air and Marine Interdiction and Coordination Center to hunt down Democratic legislators who had left Texas in order to thwart the vote on redistricting[54] – DeLay achieved his goal.

That redistricting prompted five Democrats who lost elections to civilly sue Ceverha, as well as John Colyandro, the director of TRMPAC, and Jim Ellis, the director of DeLay's national PAC, Americans for a Republican Majority, claiming corporate money was used illegally to influence their races. However, the civil case against Colyandro and Ellis will have to await the outcome of their criminal trial on money laundering charges.[55]

Ronnie Earle, the Travis County, Texas District Attorney, is investigating allegations that officers of TRMPAC laundered $190,000 in corporate contributions by sending it to the Republican National State Elections Committee (RNSEC), and, three weeks later, that same amount was disbursed to seven TRMPAC-supported Republican statehouse candidates.[56] This money came from corporate donors, such as the Kansas company Westar Energy (which sent $25,000 to a PAC in which it had no material interest,[57] other than the fact that it considered Tom DeLay essential for his support of favorable language in an upcoming energy bill), and as such is prohibited from use in state campaigns.[58] By sending the donations to RNSEC, there is tacit acknowledgement that those donations were inapplicable to the state races where they were ultimately invested. The investment was crucial to the Republican acquisition of power in Texas, which made possible the gerrymandering of districts that bolstered Republican representation in the United States House, further consolidating power for DeLay and his conservative colleagues. Earle characterizes the situation as “an effort to use corporate contributions to control representative democracy in Texas.”[59]

Peter Cloeren
This process of shifting money to avoid campaign finance restrictions would not be surprising to Peter Cloeren, CEO of Cloeren Inc. and citizen convicted of misdemeanor violations of federal campaign finance law.[60] According to an affidavit sworn by Cloeren, Tom DeLay and Brian Babin, DeLay’s protégé in a race for a district in east Texas,[61] suggested ways to get around the limit to the maximum individual contribution, which Cloeren had already reached.[62] By using his employees as “vehicles” for additional donations, having them write checks and reimbursing them with “bonuses,” as well as writing checks to other organizations and campaigns that would, in turn, be donated to Babin’s campaign, Cloeren was able to donate $37,000.[63] Mr. Babin would pick the checks up personally in Cloeren’s parking lot, in order to avoid being investigated for mail fraud.[64]

Mr. Cloeren reached a plea-bargain with federal prosecutors, not doing any jail time, but paying, as himself and through his company, $400,000 in fines.[65] Tom DeLay, “who was never charged, told CNN he didn't know Cloeren ‘from Adam.’”[66] Nobody else was charged in the case, but the Federal Election Commission levied fines against Triad, one of the organizations to which Cloeren sent money and which, in turn, donated that amount to Babin’s campaign.[67]

Tom DeLay has used his financial power to tame the House in the same way he has used his political power to tame K Street. As the master of winning House votes by razor thin margins – the Medicare vote is an example – words such as “compromise” and “bipartisanship” are foreign to his vocabulary. The rights and desires of the sizeable minority in this country that did not vote for his extreme right-wing agenda figure not at all in his legislation. It is imperative to his continued power that Republicans have as wide a cushion of control as possible. Reliance on such narrow victories has made him completely dependent on Republicans obtaining as close to total control of the House as possible. The damage to the reputation of the Congress is becoming more apparent, with a recent poll showing only 33% of the public approve of the job Congress is doing – the same approval rating Congress got before the Republican take-over in 1994.[68]

He has used his fundraising prowess as a tool to populate the United States House of Representatives with people beholden to him. By spending so liberally through his various organizations, by getting lobbyists to contribute so substantially,[69] as well as by conducting a virtual candidate school – complete with “tapes, talking points, even a video that demonstrated the effective use of yard signs”[70] – DeLay has provided himself with a buffer of support in the House that has come through for him on votes, as well as insulating him (so far) from the effects of his questionable ethics.

Republicans have tempted public censure for proposing a change in the rule that prohibited members under indictment from serving in leadership positions, a move widely seen as an attempt to protect DeLay in case Ronnie Earle charged him with any criminal activity relating to his TRMPAC investigation.[71] Although denied by the Republican leadership in the House, the common impression held by most news outlets, by government watchdog groups, and by Democrats is that this fundamental restructuring of ethics committee rules was proposed in order to protect Majority Leader DeLay. In fact, the impression was heightened when committee Republicans backed down in the face of public opprobrium – after it became clear that the Texas grand jury would not be immediately indicting DeLay.[72]

This cronyism has not always prevailed, however. Representative Kenny Hulshof of Missouri received $14,500 from the Americans for a Republican Majority (ARMPAC), DeLay’s national version of TRMPAC, since 1997.[73] As chair of the ethics subcommittee that investigated the Majority Leader’s actions regarding Representative Nick Smith and the Medicare vote, he voted to admonish Mr. DeLay for having “gone ‘beyond the boundaries” of party discipline.”[74] In return, Mr. Hulshof was removed from the ethics committee, a move Hulshof interpreted as a rebuke for his role in admonishing DeLay.[75] Joel Hefley, the Colorado Republican who chaired the entire ethics committee that admonished DeLay three times, and who had not received donations from DeLay, was also replaced.[76]

New rules that were enacted to make it impossible to start an ethics investigation without at least one committee Republican signing on have been successfully fought by Democrats on the committee.[77] Mr. DeLay has become the symbol of the Evil Republican, used by Democrats in emailings and requests for donations since the beginning of 2005. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has a website called “Tom DeLay’s House of Scandal,” complete with diagram showing DeLay’s connection with other conservatives such as Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist.[78] There are links to Republicans searchable by state, showing ties to Tom DeLay such as the amount of money they have received from one of his PACs or the amount they have donated to his legal defense as well as featuring a hammer graphic, indicating the donation targets being reached by the DCCC.[79]

Effects
These examples of possible corruption on the part of Congressman DeLay are just a small part of the pattern of abuse that has been making increasing press in the spring of 2005. Strangely, the more garden-variety examples of corruption – lavish lobbyist- and foreign-agent-paid trips and corporate cronyism – may be the charges that bring DeLay down. The Texas money-laundering trials of his close associates may add to the weight of public opinion, breaking the hold on power that he has cultivated for decades.

On Democratic Norms
There is a question of what lasting impact ethics irregularities have on voter opinions and on democracy itself. Since there has been little systematic study on the effects of corruption on the attitudes of citizens toward their political institutions, it is difficult to outline the specific damage done to Americans’ faith in their government done by Tom DeLay’s ethics cloud.[80]

Perception of specific corruption on the public at large may have the effect of further depressing participation in political processes by people already unlikely to vote or otherwise take part. Corruption more negatively shapes the perceptions of people already less invested in the process; women, members of lower socioeconomic classes, the unemployed, and people with lower levels of education.[81] Already underrepresented in the halls of power, perceptions of a corrupt system further alienates these segments of society, to the point that they may even more effectively disenfranchise themselves. There is a “significant corroding effect of corruption on trust in civil servants,”[82] discouraging broad political participation, further marginalizing the concerns of people who may need government assistance the most. The legitimacy of the system is called into question,[83] even in an established democracy such as the United States. Lower voter turnout may be one outcome of perceived corruption.

By attempting to inappropriately insulate himself and his conservative cronies from real political competition, Tom DeLay is undermining the norms of a democratic society. The effect of his party’s monopoly on power is similar to business monopolies in an economy: lack of competition in political ideas stifle innovation that may be necessary to deal with America’s pressing problems. Unethical behavior can lead to substandard legislation, and harm the reputation of Congress.[84] Minority concerns are suppressed, power is concentrated rather than diffused, governmental legitimacy is undermined, and resources and effort are redirected to maintenance and protection of power rather than toward defining and addressing problems of the electorate.

On Tom DeLay’s Future
A poll conducted by Zogby International shows some troubling indicators for Tom DeLay’s future. When asked the question, “If the election for Congress were held today and the candidates were Republican Tom DeLay and someone else, for whom would you vote?” “Someone else” wins 45% to 38.4%.[85] However, when it comes to actually punishing an unethical politician by voting him out of office, the results are not so clear cut. Oskar Kurer finds that voters continue to support corrupt politicians, presumably because ethical concerns are only part of the whole package presented by a politician, along with factors such as ability to deliver pork for his district, the perception that a politician shares a voter’s values, as well as other attributes.[86]

DeLay’s falling fortunes with the voters in his district may demonstrate, while most people are able to ignore a corrupt reputation when voting for the “whole package,” perhaps when faced with specific, repeated examples of violations, corruption becomes more of a factor in a voter’s decision. Knowing of specific cases of corrupt behavior may have more of an effect than ascribing to the general position that “politicians are corrupt.”

Incumbency may protect Tom DeLay in more subtle ways than just the increased opportunities for fundraising and the public platform that are no small ingredients in a politician’s success. There is evidence that voters do not simply rationally weigh their elected official’s performance to decide if he is worth voting for, but rather view their representative’s behavior through a lens of ideology, whether or not they voted for the member in the past,[87] and their investment in the political process.[88] People that perceive themselves in the majority – as conservative voters in the Texas 22nd District would have a right to – are less likely to view their representatives as corrupt:[89] “…in the context of analyzing corruption and support for the political system, the relevant heuristic is likely to be support for the incumbent political authorities.”[90]

In the short term (one election cycle) representatives in leadership positions were “significantly more likely to survive an allegation of unethical behavior,”[91]although being in the majority party had little significant effect.[92] DeLay receives some short-term protection from the fact that he is serving now, rather than prior to the mid-1980s, although long-term survival does not appear to be much affected by the time of service.[93]

The most significant indicator of survivability is electoral security.[94] It is in this category that Mr. DeLay may have “redistricted” himself out of a job. Prior to the 2004 election, Tom DeLay won comfortably with 60% of the vote in 2000 and 63% of the vote in 2002.[95] However, in 2004, political newcomer Richard Morrison won 41% of the vote to Tom DeLay’s 55% – while spending $630,000 to DeLay’s $2.9 million.[96] Because “candidates being investigated for unethical behaviors who seek reelection lose an average of 5% to 10% of the vote…,”[97] DeLay’s efforts at redistricting in Texas, getting him into possible trouble with both civil and criminal courts in the state, may have made him electorally vulnerable enough for a Democrat to be able to unseat him. The increased media attention also has the potential to negatively affect the Majority Leader in the short term.[98]

Conclusion
With the recent preliminary ruling in the civil case against TRMPAC’s treasurer, Bill Ceverha, [99] questions about DeLay’s ethics have moved back to the media forefront. Upcoming House ethics investigations, criminal suits against close associates in Texas, ongoing media coverage of the provenance of DeLay’s lavish foreign trips promise to keep the heat on the Majority Leader. Whether of not Tom DeLay continues in the United States House of Representatives, his corrupt behavior has damaged democratic norms as well as his own and Congress’s reputations.

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dealings on Medicare vote,” The Hill, (October 5, 2004), http://www.thehill.com/news/10052004/floor.aspx

Kornblut, Anne E., “Treasurer of Texas Group Is Fined Nearly $200,000,” The New York
Times website, (May 27, 2005), http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/27/politics/27delay.html?ei=5094&en=bfaafeb3b73232ab&hp=&ex=1117252800&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print

Levine, Samantha, “DeLay blames Democrats for ethics panel problems,” Houston
Chronicle website, (May 18, 2005), http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/nation/3188697

Moreno, Sylvia, “DeLay PAC Trial Looks at Money-Laundering Claims,” Washington
Post website, (March 4, 2005), http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5357-2005Mar3.html

Moreno, Sylvia, “Texas Trial Begins Against Treasurer of DeLay Group,” Washington
Post website, (March 1, 2005), http://www.washingtonpost.com/?nav=globetop

Murray, Mark, “Voters dissatisfied with Bush, Congress,”MSNBC.com, (May 19, 2005),
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7899754/

Ratcliffe, R.G., “DeLay’s Investment Pays Off,” Houston Chronicle website, (October
10, 2003), http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/2148270

“Rigging the Rules,” Washington Post website, (December 31, 2004),
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37888-2004Dec30.html?sub=AR

Roane, Kit R., Dan Morrison, and Carol Flake Chapman, “Will the Hammer Fall?” U.S.
News and World Report website, (March 28, 2005), http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/050328/28delay.htm

Root, Jay, “Eyes of Texas, U.S. on Truant Legislators,” Star-Telegram website, (May 14,
2003), http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/5858118.htm?1c

Rose-Ackerman, Susan, “Political corruption and democratic structures,” The Political
Economy of Corruption by Arvind K. Jain, (Routledge: New York, 1998)

Smith, R. Jeffrey, “DeLay Airfare Was Charged To Lobbyist's Credit Card,” Washington
Post website, (April 24, 2005), http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12416-2005Apr23.html

Thompson, Nicholas, “The Exterminator,” Salon.com, (September 3, 2003),
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2003/09/03/delay/index.html

“Tom DeLay’s House of Scandal,” Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee,
http://houseofscandal.org/main.html

Warren, Mark E., “What Does Corruption Mean in a Democracy?” American Journal of
Political Science, (Vol. 48, No. 2, April 2004)

Wedeman, Andrew, “Looters, Rent-Scrapers, and Dividend-Collectors: Corruption and
Growth in Zaire, South Korea, and the Philippines,” The Journal of Developing Areas, (Summer, 1997)
[1] Pam Easton, “Embattled GOP Leader Finds Haven Among Gun Lobby,” AOL News website, (Associated Press, April 17, 2005), http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/news/article.adp?id=20050410123309990002&ncid=NWS00010000000001
[2] “Democratic Committee Files Suit Against DeLay Over Fund-raising,” CNN website, (May 3, 2000),
http://archives.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/05/03/delay.cnn/
[3] R. Jeffrey Smith, “DeLay Airfare Was Charged To Lobbyist's Credit Card,” Washington Post website, (April 24, 2005), http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12416-2005Apr23.html
[4] Mike Allen and R. Jeffrey Smith, “S. Korean Group Sponsored DeLay Trip,” Washington Post website, (March 10, 2005), http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22067-2005Mar9.html
[5] Sylvia Moreno, “Texas Trial Begins Against Treasurer of DeLay Group,” Washington Post website, (March 1, 2005), http://www.washingtonpost.com/?nav=globetop
[6] Sylvia Moreno, “DeLay PAC Trial Looks at Money-Laundering Claims,” Washington Post website, (March 4, 2005), http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5357-2005Mar3.html
[7] Samuel P. Huntington, “Modernization and Corruption,” Political Order in Changing Societies, (Yale University Press: New Haven, CT, 1968), p. 59
[8] Andrew Wedeman, “Looters, Rent-Scrapers, and Dividend-Collectors: Corruption and Growth in Zaire, South Korea, and the Philippines,” The Journal of Developing Areas, (Summer, 1997), p. 457
[9] Susan Rose-Ackerman, “Political corruption and democratic structures,” The Political Economy of Corruption by Arvind K. Jain, (Routledge: New York, 1998), p.35
[10] Rose-Ackerman, p. 35
[11] Dahl, Robert A. Democracy and Its Critics, (Yale University Press: New Haven, CT, 1989)
[12] Dahl, Robert A., “Equality versus Inequality”, Comparative Politics, (Wadsworth Publishing, 9th Edition, 1999), p. 389
[13] Warren, Mark E., “What Does Corruption Mean in a Democracy?” American Journal of Political Science, (Vol. 48, No. 2, April 2004), p.332
[14] Warren, p. 333
[15] Warren, p. 334
[16] Warren, p. 334
[17] Warren, p. 338
[18] Warren, p. 338
[19] Jeffrey Earnest Grell, “RICO in a Nutshell,” RICOAct.com website, http://www.ricoact.com/ricoact/nutshell.asp
[20] Nicholas Confessore, “Welcome to the Machine,” The Washington Monthly website, (July/August 2003), http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0307.confessore.html
[21] Confessore
[22] Confessore
[23] Confessore
[24] Lou Dubose and Jan Reid, The Hammer: Tom DeLay, God, Money, and the Rise of the Republican Congress, (Perseus Books Group: New York, 2004), p. 171
[25] Dubose, p. 170
[26] Dubose, p. 173
[27] Dubose, p. 171
[28] Dubose, p. 163
[29] Dubose, p. 164
[30] Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Inc. v Tom DeLay and others., United States District Court for the District of Columbia, (May 3, 2000), no. 29
[31] Dubose, p. 166
[32] Dubose, p. 166
[33] DCCC, Inc. v Tom DeLay
[34] Dubose, p. 169
[35] Dubose, p. 168
[36] “Ethics Committee Hammers DeLay,” The Amarillo Globe-News Online, (Associated Press, May 15, 1999), http://amarillo.com/stories/051599/usn_LA0684.002.shtml
[37] Dubose, p. 278
[38] Dubose, p. 279
[39] Dubose, p. 279
[40] Charles Babington, “Ethics Panel Rebukes DeLay,” Washington Post website, (October 1, 2004), http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A63387-2004Sep30.html
[41] Jonathan E. Kaplan, “Horse-trading on House floor: Ethics panel details DeLay’s dealings on Medicare vote,” The Hill, (October 5, 2004), http://www.thehill.com/news/10052004/floor.aspx
[42] Babington
[43] Dubose, p. 280
[44] Kaplan
[45] Kaplan
[46] Kaplan
[47] Dubose, p. 279
[48] Dubose, p. 279
[49] Dubose, p. 87
[50] Moreno, “Texas Trial Begins Against Treasurer of DeLay Group”
[51] R.G. Ratcliffe, “DeLay’s Investment Pays Off,” Houston Chronicle website, (October 10, 2003), http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/2148270
[52] Ratcliffe
[53] Ratcliffe
[54] Jay Root, “Eyes of Texas, U.S. on Truant Legislators,” Star-Telegram website, (May 14, 2003), http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/5858118.htm?1c
[55] Moreno, “DeLay PAC Trial Looks at Money-Laundering Claims”
[56] Moreno, “DeLay PAC Trial Looks at Money-Laundering Claims”
[57] Nicholas Thompson, “The Exterminator,” Salon.com, (September 3, 2003), http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2003/09/03/delay/index.html
[58] Thompson
[59] Kit R. Roane, Dan Morrison, and Carol Flake Chapman, “Will the Hammer Fall?” U.S. News and World Report website, (March 28, 2005), http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/050328/28delay.htm
[60] Dubose, p. 122
[61] Dubose, p. 116
[62] Roane
[63] Dubose, p. 117
[64] Dubose, p. 122
[65] Roane
[66] Roane
[67] Dubose, p. 125
[68] Mark Murray, “Voters dissatisfied with Bush, Congress,”MSNBC.com, (May 19, 2005), http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7899754/
[69] Dubose, p. 87
[70] Dubose, p. 87
[71] “Rigging the Rules,” Washington Post website, (December 31, 2004), http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37888-2004Dec30.html?sub=AR
[72] Carl Hulse, “After Retreat, G.O.P. Changes House Ethics Rule,” The New York Times, (January 5, 2005), p. 1
[73] Justin Gest, “Complaint about GOP leader puts pressure on House panel,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, (September 24, 2004), p. A11
[74] Deirdre Shesgreen, “Speaker takes Hulshof off House ethics committee,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, (February 3, 2005), p. A03
[75] Shesgreen, p. A03
[76] Alexander Bolton and Patrick O’Connor, “Hefley joins Dems on ethics,” The Hill website, (March 16, 2005), http://www.thehill.com/thehill/export/TheHill/News/Frontpage/031605/hefley.html
[77] Samantha Levine, “DeLay blames Democrats for ethics panel problems,” Houston Chronicle website, (May 18, 2005), http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/nation/3188697
[78] “Tom DeLay’s House of Scandal,” Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, http://houseofscandal.org/main.html
[79] “Tom DeLay’s House of Scandal”
[80] Christopher J. Anderson and Yuliya V. Tverdova, “Corruption, Political Allegiances, and Attitudes Toward Government in Contemporary Democracies,” America Journal of Political Science, (Vol. 47, No. 1, January 2003), p. 93
[81] Anderson and Tverdova, p. 101
[82] Anderson and Tverdova, p. 102
[83] Anderson and Tverdova, p. 104
[84] Rebekah Herrick “Who Will Survive? An Exploration of Factors Contributing to the Removal of Unethical House Members,” American Politics Quarterly, (Vol. 28, No. 1, January 2000), p. 97
[85] “Texas 22nd CD Poll 3/30/05 through 4/1/05,” Zogby International, (April 1, 2005)
[86] Oskar Kurer, “Why do voters support corrupt politicians?” The Political Economy of Corruption by Arvind K. Jain, (Routledge: New York, 1998), p. 76
[87] Herrick, p. 100
[88] Anderson and Tverdova, p. 102
[89] Anderson and Tverdova, p. 101
[90] Anderson and Tverdova, p. 94
[91] Herrick, p. 104
[92] Herrick, p. 104
[93] Herrick, p. 105
[94] Herrick, p. 104
[95] Mike Allen, “DeLay Moves To Protect His Political Base Back in Texas,” Washington Post website, (March 3, 2005), http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2575-2005Mar2.html
[96] Wendy Benjaminson, “Democrats Weigh 2006 Challenge to DeLay,” Associated Press, (April 7, 2005), http://www.richardmorrisonfordistrict22.com/news/050407.php
[97] Herrick, p. 97
[98] Herrick, p. 103
[99] Anne E. Kornblut, “Treasurer of Texas Group Is Fined Nearly $200,000,” The New York Times website, (May 27, 2005), http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/27/politics/27delay.html?ei=5094&en=bfaafeb3b73232ab&hp=&ex=1117252800&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print

The Darwinian Earthquake: Shocks and Aftershocks from 1859 to the Present

2007-11-24T17:49:00.000-08:00

This is actually one of my favorite papers because, in researching it, I was able to understand why social conservatives decided to expend so much ammuntion against Darwin and evolution.

The Darwinian Earthquake
Never in the history of man has so terrific a calamity befallen the race as that which all who look may now behold advancing as a deluge, black with destruction, resistless in might, uprooting our most cherished hopes, engulfing our most precious creed, and burying our highest life in mindless desolation….The flood-gates of infidelity are open, and Atheism overwhelming is upon us.[1]

For many Americans educated in the late-twentieth century, the current furor over evolution and its concepts of natural selection and non-supernatural theories on the origins of life on earth may seem overwrought, perhaps antiquated. However, as late as May 2005, the struggle between creationists and evolutionists continues, having moved from academia and social theory to the public school system. In Dover, Pennsylvania, the school board voted to have high school biology teachers inform students that “Darwin's theory is a theory ... not a fact," and that “Intelligent design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin's view.”[2] This attempt to move creationism from the church into the science class has met with fierce opposition from educators and some parents. Eleven Dover parents, supported by the American Civil Liberties Union, have filed a lawsuit against the school board in order to remove mention of creationism from public high school science classes.[3]
This is the latest battle in the fight mapped out by the Intelligent Design movement to overturn evolution’s position as the accepted scientific theory of the beginning of life. The leaders of the movement recognize the fundamental shift in worldview made possible by the migration of Darwin’s concepts – nature’s constant flux as well as the compelling, but non-supernatural, story of the genesis of life on earth, and the singular utility of the scientific method – into American social and philosophical thought. Yet the secular observer of this new attack on the naturalist scientific method can be forgiven for not comprehending the earthquake that shook the world with the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. To understand what battle is really being fought by the Intelligent Design movement, one must look at the new ways of envisioning reality made possible by the concept of evolution.

Darwin’s Earthquake
Darwin has demonstrated this force, this process of Nature; he has opened the door by which a happier coming race will cast out miracles, never to return. Every one who knows what miracles imply will praise him, in consequence, as one of the greatest benefactors of the human race.
David Strauss, German Biblical critic[4]

Darwin’s use of the scientific method allowed him to find evidence in support of a theory that could disprove the physical reality of the metaphysical biblical account of creation. This discovery allowed subsequent social thinkers to divorce reality from a supernatural foundation, making it possible to claim that reality is man-made, and that the only meaningful questions are the ones whose natural processes can be tested and either verified or falsified.
Darwin himself grasped the import of his theories. He solicited the advice of his friend, Charles Lyell, regarding his submission of On the Origin of Species to John Murray for publication:

"Would you advise me to tell Murray that my book is not more un-orthodox than the subject makes inevitable. That I do not discuss the origin of man. That I do not bring in any discussion about Genesis, etc, etc, and only give facts, and such conclusions from them as seem to me fair.
Or had I better say nothing to Murray, and assume that he cannot object to this much unorthodoxy, which in fact is not more than any Geologica Treatise which runs slap counter to Genesis."[5]

Religious leaders were quick to see the religious and social implications of Darwin’s theory. In planning a counter-offensive to Darwin’s dangerous ideas, his former teacher, Professor Adam Sedgwick (characterized by his biographer as a man that held “next to scientific truth, his main concern was to demonstrate the teleological value of such truths”[6]) became the nucleus for a group of opponents of Darwinism. Among the members of “Sedgwick and Co.”[7] was the Archbishop of Dublin, who gave voice to the importance of stemming the damage inflicted by ideas of evolution and natural selection:
"I felt alarm at the apparent high favour and wide celebrity of Darwin’s theory…because it was likely to establish our descent from Molluscs or Insects….But my own paper emphasizes the improbability of the last step of all – the advance of the savage-man into the civilized, without external help. I doubt the conversion of oats into rye: their conversion into apple-trees, I disbelieve: but what I have undertaken to disprove is the conversion of the unaided savage into the civilized man."[8]

When evolution began to be taught in the schools and colleges of the United States, citizens who held the Bible as the source of ultimate truth saw the popular teaching of evolution as devastating. William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925), three-time populist Democratic candidate for President, became a leader in the Fundamentalist crusade to banish Darwin's theory of evolution from American classrooms in the first decade of the 1900s.[9] The same deep Christian impulse that led Bryan to champion women’s rights became the foundation of his passionate belief that teaching evolution in schools would destroy the foundational American belief in the Bible as the literal Word of God, with destructive social consequences. In 1921 Bryan wrote The Menace of Darwinism, and in 1923 began to focus his energies on outlawing the teaching of evolution in public schools.[10] By 1925, fifteen states had anti-evolution statutes pending,[11] but, after the publicity of the Scopes Trial, only two states – Arkansas and Mississippi – passed laws restricting the teaching of evolution.[12] By that time, Pragmatism, with its adherence to Darwinism, had become firmly entrenched as the dominant intellectual philosophy in the United States.

The American Pragmatists

Rufus: He said mankind got it all wrong by taking a good idea and building a belief structure on it.
Bethany: You’re saying having beliefs is a bad thing?
Rufus: I just think it’s better to have ideas. I mean, you can change an idea; changing a belief is trickier. People die for it; people kill for it.[13]

The American Pragmatists were all touched by the incredible brutality and waste of the Civil War (Oliver Wendell Holmes having been wounded three times in his military service). The onset of modernity initiated new psychological pathologies – such as depression – by shaking patterns of behavior and belief previously held immutable.
The most groundbreaking scientific development of the pre-Civil War era was the codifying of the theory of evolution in Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Concepts of natural selection and the role of chance in determining survival were often seen as a direct challenge to religious orthodoxy, as the physical forces of evolution were presented as natural, thus amoral, and therefore challenging religious concepts of reward and punishment, as well as bringing into dispute the “facts” set forth in the Bible – notably moving the age of the earth from a few thousand years to possibly several millions of years. In response to the cataclysmic changes produced by modernization, Pragmatists such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Saunders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey developed a philosophy that would reject formalism, embrace change, and provide a useful method for living in the world.
Pragmatism as a theory rejected Formalism (the widely held system of thought that held reality as static, mechanistic, absolute). It is operationalist, with Pragmatic theoreticians seeking operation over cause in philosophical questions – the “how” rather than the “why.”[14] Pragmatists embraced Darwinian “process” and interpreted evolution in social terms. As naturalists, they understood the world to be intelligible through natural (not supernatural), material processes.

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935), influential and long-serving Justice of the United State Supreme Court, applied Pragmatic philosophy and Darwinian contextualism to his concepts of the law. “The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience,”[15] Holmes stated in rejection of legal formalism, resisting the image of law as some abstract truth to be discovered. Rather, Holmes presented law as being formed by judges in a particular cultural milieu. The practice of law is the method for predicting the reaction of judge and jury, the lawyer earning his fee by developing arguments to help his client avoid legal sanctions, not as an exercise of pure logic and precedent.[16] As an opponent of strict-constructionism, Holmes was comfortable with the idea that law should change as society changes, with its utility being expressed in the law’s ability to meet current cultural needs, not in its ability to be loyal to some abstract, higher legal truth.

Charles Saunders Peirce (1839-1914), who originated the term Pragmatism from Kant’s Pragmaticism (to Kant’s irritation), was an anti-nominalist who defined himself as a realist. He provided the Pragmatic Method to satisfy the human drive to establish beliefs – habits that settled uncomfortable feelings of uncertainty. Peirce believed this drive to be evolutionarily beneficial, with the establishment of “salutary” habits enhancing the likelihood of survival.[17] Though chance would never disappear (tychism), the cosmos was moving toward order.[18] This progressive view of evolution was a particular characteristic of the American Pragmatists.
William James (1842-1910), noted psychologist, developed his philosophy of Pragmatism in service to his desire to alleviate suffering, especially psychological suffering. He denied the objective reality of the Idealists, maintaining that there is only experience, with humans moving from one experience to the next, experiences that are related to one another in a similar fashion to the frames of a movie. In “Pragmatism and Humanism,” James illustrated the all-encompassing effect of human thought in the shaping of reality, with interest driving the very creation of reality.[19] For James, there was no pre-reality; therefore, only sense-ible experiences make sense. Ideas are open to modification and revision. To claim ultimate truth for any idea is dictatorial, since no truth is final and infallible.[20] Future discoveries will modify today’s truth just as surely as Galileo’s proof of a Copernican, sun-centered solar system forced eventual modification of the concept of a geocentric planetary structure. While James accepted mystical experience as important and real, as any experience is important and real, he maintained that the personal religious experience is only important to the individual’s internal reality and development, since it was noetic and ineffable – deep knowledge beyond ordinary communication.[21]

No other Pragmatist has had as strong and long-lived influence on American public education as John Dewey (1859-1952). Underpinning his pedagogy is the shared Pragmatic devotion to Darwinian process, naturalism, and the applicability of the scientific method to social sciences. Because science had undermined the solid foundation that religious faith and dogma had provided to the western world, “[t]he problem of restoring integration and cooperation between man’s beliefs about the world in which he lives and his beliefs about the values and purposes that should direct his conduct is the deepest problem of modern life. It is the problem of any philosophy that is not isolated from that life.”[22] The human construction of the Great Community was a human’s fundamental responsibility, not a “change made within the mind by contemplation of the realm of essence.”[23] He had no use for metaphysical ideals: “…to-day many persons find a peculiar consolation in the face of the unstable and dubious presence of values in actual experience by projecting a perfect form of good into a realm of essence if not into a heaven beyond the earthly skies, wherein their authority, if not their existence, is wholly unshakeable.”[24] Dewey eulogized Darwin himself “for liberating science from the shackles of teleology by destroying the old idealistic notion of a species as a fixed form or final cause.”[25]
A common thread in the philosophies of the American Pragmatists is not just the acceptance, but the embrace of constant change. Tracing evolution backward, they were presented with the earthshaking concept of simple organic forms – life – rising from inorganic matter through natural processes and evolving through eons into the hugely varied life forms currently observable. Because it was now possible to define a reality in which nature was the driving force, not God, the process was amoral, and therefore open to manipulation by humans for their benefit and the benefit of humanity. Since there was no absolute to be called upon to validate social structures, those structures could be recognized to have been erected by human design, open to human intervention and human innovation. The American Pragmatists also tended to ignore the darker societal concepts that could be implied by natural selection – that protection of the weak only circumvented processes that were responsible for maintaining the fitness of the human race, or so-called Social Darwinism. The American Pragmatists were eager to perform social husbandry in the way that agriculturalists had long performed animal husbandry, making a society that was more in line with human concepts of desirable social characteristics.

The Logical Positivists
The fundamental thesis of modern empiricism consists in denying the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge.
Hans Hahn, Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, WissenschaftlicheWeltauffassung.
Der Wiener Kreis[26]

Although their efforts to return the intellectual pursuits of academia to the ivory tower would have been anathema to a Pragmatist like John Dewey,[27] the Logical Positivists continued the eradication of religion, of transcendence, of metaphysics from the realm of legitimate inquiry. Because metaphysics is not verifiable or falsifiable by scientific means, it is non-sense, poetry, unavailable for testing:
"Metaphysicians cannot avoid making their propositions non‑verifiable, because if they made them verifiable, the decision about the truth or falsehood of their doctrines would depend upon experience and therefore belong to the region of empirical science. This consequence they wish to avoid, because they pretend to teach knowledge which is of a higher level than that of empirical science Thus they are compelled to cut all connection between their propositions and experience; and precisely by this procedure they deprive them of any sense."[28]

Logical Positivists became highly influential in American academia after several members of the Vienna Circle – Rudolf Carnap, Herbert Feigl, Philipp Frank, Kurt Gödel, Carl Hempel and Hans Reichenbach – fled Nazism in Europe and settled in the United States.[29] They sought to peel away ambiguity inherent in language and thought to premises and propositions that could be manipulated logically, mathematically, scientifically. The Logical Positivists followed four basic lines of research in America:
Philosophy of physics, mainly performed by Reichenbach and Frank. Reichenbach wrote about the theory of relativity, quantum physics, philosophy of time; Frank wrote a biography of Einstein and an analysis of the theory of relativity.
Theory of probability and inductive logic, a field in which Carnap produced many works.
Logical analysis of the structure of a scientific theory and its language.
Carnap wrote several works on both classical and modal logic and about semantics.[30]
Although their hegemony has been challenged in the last few decades by Existentialism and Post-Modernism, Logical Positivists still have a lot of clout in the social sciences. Carl Degler points to the development of co-evolutionary theories of culture,[31] of politics,[32] of economics,[33] and of sociology,[34] even the inspiration that “evolutionary theory has…potentiality to unify the social sciences, to provide an umbrella of large theory that would subsume the increasingly diverse fields that make up the once celebrated and hoped for “science of man.”[35]
It is on this battle field that the current Intelligent Design warriors have chosen to engage the modern root of humanist social thought – Darwinism.

The Discovery Institute Center for Science and Culture

Christians in the 20th century have been playing defense….They’ve been fighting a defensive war to defend what they have, to defend as much of it as they can….It never turns the tide. What we’re trying to do is something entirely different. We’re trying to go into enemy territory, their very center, and blow up the ammunition dump. What is their ammunition dump in this metaphor? It is their version of creation.
Phillip E. Johnson[36]

The Discovery Institute, a creationist think-tank based in Seattle, Washington, is promoting the goal of undermining Darwinist evolution and natural selection for social and religious purposes, not scientific purposes. Although one of its goals is to develop scientific credentials[37] (the goal that it has failed to achieve, however), those credentials are purely for the purpose of lending support to its aim to foster “nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies.”[38] Some of these legacies include denial of “objective moral standards,” undermining “personal responsibility….The results can be seen in modern approaches to criminal justice, product liability, and welfare,” and the advocacy of “coercive government programs that falsely promised to create heaven on earth.”[39]
In service of this goal, the “Wedge” strategy was developed (the “Wedge Document appeared anonymously online, and Discovery Institute authorship has never been affirmed or denied by the think tank).[40] Of all the phases of the Wedge strategy – Scientific Research, Writing, and Publication; Publicity and Opinion-making; and Culture Confrontation and Renewal[41] – the Institute has made major strides, except in the area of scientific research, writing, and publication, the only area that would lend true academic legitimacy to the movement.[42]
However, by concentrating on establishing a beachhead in the arena of public opinion, the Intelligent Design movement has positioned itself as “negative,” – only able to poke holes in theories of evolution and natural selection, unable to provide a “positive” hypothesis in its own right.[43] In deed, by the very nature of its dependence on the supernatural, it cannot provide a scientific hypothesis since the scientific method relies on the observation of verifiable or falsifiable, observable, natural phenomena. To allow Intelligent Design into the science classroom, science itself must be redefined.

What’s the Matter with Kansas?
Did Darwin figure,

Examining finches' beaks,

There'd be a Kansas?

Doug Linder
Professor of Law,
University of Missouri, Kansas City[44]

In Topeka, Kansas, the conservative state Board of Education is considering changing the definition of science in the introduction to the state’s science standard from “a human activity of systematically seeking natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us” – preferred by a majority of educators – to “‘a systematic method of continuing investigation,’ without specifying what kind of answer is being sought.”[45] Stephen Meyer, of the Discovery Institute, maintains that the new definition would have the benefit of not “freezing out” questions about how life began on earth.
Science groups boycotted the public hearings regarding the choice, stating that the debate was “rigged” against evolutionists. The continuing argument illustrates the tug-of-war between a less-conservative board, which reinstated the references to evolution deleted by a previous board, and the more conservative board that has recently regained control.[46]
The board plans to make a choice between the competing definitions by August.[47]

Dover Revisited
You won’t find any opposition to the idea of evolution among sophisticated, educated theologians. It comes from an exceedingly retarded, primitive version of religion, which unfortunately is at present undergoing an epidemic in the United States. Not in Europe, not in Britain, but in the United States.
Richard Dawkins, author[48]

Even as the trial in Dover, Pennsylvania starts in September, voters will be considering two competing slates for the seven open seats on the nine-member school board that mandated the Intelligent Design statement be read by biology teachers to their classes.[49] Both Republican (who support the statement) and the Democrats (who support “discussing intelligent design as a religious concept in Humanities courses instead of biology classes”),[50] had hoped to sweep the primaries and thus avoid a showdown. Since the fourteen candidates are allowed to run in both the Republican and the Democratic primaries, a victory in both primaries would have allowed the concept touted by one side or the other to essentially run unopposed in November. The race was the “most hotly contested in memory.”[51]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Burg, Evelyn, Lecture, American Philosophy and Intellectual History 1880-1960,
(February 10, 2005)

Carnap, Rudolf, “The Rejection of Metaphysics,” Philosophy and Logical Syntax, (1935)

Dao, James, “Ballot Battle Over Evolution Ends in a 7-to-7 Tie,” The New York Times,
(May 19, 2005, Section A)

Degler, Carl N., In Search of Human Nature, (Oxford University Press: New York, 1991)

Hanna, John, “Kansas Debate Challenges Science Itself,” Washington Post website, (May
15, 2005), www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ content/article/2005/05/16/AR2005051600368.html

Himmelfarb, Gertrude, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution, (Doubleday & Co, Inc.,
Garden City, New York, 1959)

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, “The Path of the Law,” Harvard Law Review, (No. 457, 1897)

James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience, (Dover Publications, Inc.:
Mineola, NY, 2002)

Linder, Doug, “Speech on the Occasion of the 75th Anniversary of the Opening of the
Scopes Trial,” Famous Trials, University of Missouri, Kansas City, website, http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/ftrials.htm

Linder, Doug, “William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925),” Famous Trials, University of
Missouri, Kansas City, website, http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/ftrials.htm

“Logical Positivism,” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, University of Tennessee
at Martin website, http://www.iep.utm.edu/l/logpos.htm

McDermott, John J., ed., The Philosophy of John Dewey, “The Construction of the
Good,” (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1981)

McDermott, John J., ed., The Philosophy of John Dewey, “The Influence of Darwinism
on Philosophy,” (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1981)

McDermott, John J., ed., The Philosophy of John Dewey, “Philosophy’s Search for the
Immutable,” (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1981)

McDermott, John J., The Writings of William James, “Pragmatism and Humanism,”
(University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1967)

Peirce, Charles S., “The Fixation of Belief,” Popular Science Monthly, (No. 12, 1877),
http://www.peirce.org/writings/p107.html

Pennock, Robert T., ed., Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics, “The Wedge at
Work: How Intelligent Design Creationism is Wedging Its Way into the Cultural and Academic Mainstream,” by Barbara Forrest, (The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 2001)

Slack, Gordy, “The Atheist,” Salon website, (April 30, 2005), http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/04/30/dawkins/print.html

Smith, Kevin, Dogma, (Columbia Tri-Star Studio, December 3, 2002)

“Teaching Darwin Splits Pennsylvania Town,” Yahoo News website, March 27, 2005,
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1548&ncid=1548&e=1&u=/afp/20050327/lf_afp/uspoliticsreligion

White, Morton, Social Thought in America, (Beacon Press, 1963)
[1] Gertrude Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution, (Doubleday & Co, Inc., Garden City, New York, 1959), p. 370
[2] “Teaching Darwin Splits Pennsylvania Town,” Yahoo News website, March 27, 2005, http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1548&ncid=1548&e=1&u=/afp/20050327/lf_afp/uspoliticsreligion
[3] “Teaching Darwin Splits Pennsylvania Town”
[4]Himmelfarb, p. 368
[5] Himmelfarb, p. 241
[6] Himmelfarb, p. 257
[7] Himmelfarb, p. 259
[8] Himmelfarb, p. 259
[9] Doug Linder, “William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925),” Famous Trials, University of Missouri, Kansas City, website, http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/ftrials.htm

[10] Linder, “William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925)”
[11] Linder, “State v. John Scopes”
[12] Linder, “State v. John Scopes”
[13] Kevin Smith, Dogma, (Columbia Tri-Star Studio, December 3, 2002)
[14] John J. McDermott, ed., The Philosophy of John Dewey, “The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy,” (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1981), p. 34
[15] Morton White, Social Thought in America, (Beacon Press, 1963)
[16] Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Path of the Law,” Harvard Law Review, (No. 457, 1897)
[17] Charles S. Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief,” Popular Science Monthly, (No. 12, 1877), http://www.peirce.org/writings/p107.html
[18] Dr. Evelyn Burg, Lecture, American Philosophy and Intellectual History 1880-1960, (February 10, 2005)
[19] John J. McDermott, The Writings of William James, “Pragmatism and Humanism,” (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1967), p. 451
[20] McDermott, “Pragmatism and Humanism,” p. 457
[21] William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, (Dover Publications, Inc.: Mineola, NY, 2002), p. 380
[22] John J. McDermott, ed., The Philosophy of John Dewey, “The Construction of the Good,” (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1981), p. 577
[23] McDermott, “The Construction of the Good,” p. 590
[24] John J. McDermott, ed., The Philosophy of John Dewey, “Philosophy’s Search for the Immutable,” (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1981), p.377
[25] Himmelfarb, p. 325
[26] “Logical Positivism,” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, University of Tennessee at Martin website, http://www.iep.utm.edu/l/logpos.htm
[27] McDermott, “The Construction of the Good,” p. 576
[28] Rudolf Carnap, “The Rejection of Metaphysics,” Philosophy and Logical Syntax, (1935)
[29] “Logical Positivism”
[30] “Logical Positivism”
[31] Carl N. Degler, In Search of Human Nature, (Oxford University Press: New York, 1991), p. 312
[32] Degler, p. 313
[33] Degler, p. 314
[34] Degler, p. 314
[35] Degler, p. 314
[36] Robert T. Pennock, ed., Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics, “The Wedge at Work: How Intelligent Design Creationism is Wedging Its Way into the Cultural and Academic Mainstream,” by Barbara Forrest, (The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 2001), p, 30
[37] Pennock, p. 16
[38] Pennock, p. 6
[39] Pennock, p. 14
[40] Pennock p. 6
[41] Pennock, p. 16
[42] Pennock, p. 19
[43] Pennock, p. 89
[44] Doug Linder, “Speech on the Occasion of the 75th Anniversary of the Opening of the Scopes Trial,” Famous Trials, University of Missouri, Kansas City, website, http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/ftrials.htm
[45] John Hanna, “Kansas Debate Challenges Science Itself,” Washington Post website, (May 15, 2005), www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ content/article/2005/05/16/AR2005051600368.html
[46] Hanna
[47] Hanna
[48] Gordy Slack, “The Atheist,” Salon website, (April 30, 2005), http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/04/30/dawkins/print.html
[49] James Dao, “Ballot Battle Over Evolution Ends in a 7-to-7 Tie,” The New York Times, (May 19, 2005, Section A), p. 16
[50] Dao
[51] Dao

Stenographer to Power: The Reagan Presidency and the Media

2007-11-18T11:44:00.000-08:00

I produced this paper in a class on the American Presidency in my third year as an undergrad. This paper got me into the Master's Program at NYU. I have no idea why.

With his inauguration in January, 1981, Ronald Reagan and his administration initiated some of the most sweeping changes in the federal government since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Reagan, however, was intent on dismantling the New Deal, seeking to minimize the role and size of the federal government, as well as enacting economic legislation that “set in motion one of the greatest government-engineered transfers of wealth in modern U.S. history.”[1] After the Reagan Revolution, both the share of total after-tax income and the share of wealth declined dramatically for the majority of Americans, while large corporations and the wealthiest citizens made large gains.[2] The enactment of his economic package effectively ended the trend toward the reduction of the gap between the richest and the poorest Americans that had been narrowing since the end of World War II.[3] Reagan’s White House Director of Communications from 1981 to 1987, David Gergen, pointed out that the country was not ready for the conservative message of reduced social spending (with reduced taxes) and the radical increase of military spending[4] that the ideologues in the administration were determined to push. Yet, we are left with the image of Reagan as a beloved and popular leader who succeeded in passing his economic programs and shifting the spectrum of political discourse in the United States to the right. This achievement was not natural or accidental, but the product of concerted exploitation of an acquiescent media and a toothless opposition party by Reagan’s skilled communications team.

The Media
“The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people.”
Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black[5]

The media culture, print and television as well as radio and magazines, was a very different beast from the adversarial force that brought Watergate to light, that dogged Gerald Ford and especially Jimmy Carter in turn, hog-tying their administrations. The persistent rightward shift of an increasingly profit-driven media, the reliance on official Washington as the only relevant source for news stories, as well as the reluctance to play executioner to yet another administration made the atmosphere conducive to manipulation by the media-savvy Reagan administration, effectively reducing the press to the position of “stenographer to power.”[6]
“…The influence of news reports goes well beyond relaying facts. The key to this power is selectivity. By reporting certain things (President Clinton’s injured knee) and ignoring others (President Roosevelt’s crippled legs), the media suggest to us what’s important.”[7] By choosing where to focus attention, the media can influence the national agenda. During the Reagan era, those whom the press considered important and worth quoting as sources were official Washington – White House spokespersons, members of Congress, sometimes academic specialists.[8] Relying almost solely on these official sources could put a journalist in the position of having to choose between protecting a valued political insider or having to bite the hand that could feed him his next story. A journalist facing deadline pressure everyday would find it more time consuming to research an issue on his or her own, especially when information for a particular story is conveniently available and attractively packaged by press secretaries.[9] The Democrats were in no position to supply a dissenting opinion for the media to quote, having just lost the presidency partly because of the fractures within the party, partly due to their fear of being portrayed as “liberal,” “tax-and-spend”, or, the worst, “soft on Communism” – epithets that seem to be eagerly attached to those who question the policies of powerful conservatives.[10] According Lesley Stahl, White House correspondent for CBS News, the relatively favorable treatment accorded the Reagan administration was because Congress “ha[d] not been a source for the press in the whole Reagan administration. They don’t want to criticize this beloved man.”[11] In contrast to its reputation for aggressive investigation, the “fundamentally passive”[12] nature of the national media corps worked against independent reporting as journalists waited for the declawed Democrats to provide a dissenting voice.
The myth of left-wing bias in the national media was given lie by the gentle coverage of the Reagan administration, especially early in his presidency. “The fact that network journalists ranked in the top 2 percent of the nation’s population by income…was not easily squared with the supposition that the media were an institution dominated by liberals.”[13] However, more important than the centrist positions of the newscasters themselves[14] were the profit-oriented focus and demonstrated conservative values of the editors and owners of the nation’s media. News editors were increasingly expected to attend to strategic planning and marketing as employees of the consolidating conglomerates that were consuming the organs of information on which the electorate was expected to depend for unbiased political information.[15] One of those proprietors of information, Associated Press president and general manager Keith Fuller, displayed his personal conservative bias a week after Reagan’s inauguration:
We don’t believe that the union of Adam and Bruce is really the same as Adam and Eve in the eyes of creation. We don’t believe people should cash welfare checks and spend them on booze and narcotics. We don’t really believe that a simple prayer or a pledge of allegiance is against the national interest in the classroom…But most of all, we’re sick of your self-perpetuating, burdening bureaucracy weighing ever more heavily on our backs.[16]

Since there appeared to be few liberals providing a reasoned, liberal basis for questioning Reaganism, it would have been extremely foolish for the media chiefs to challenge an administration as pro-corporate as Reagan’s. As Columbia University’s Michael Janeway argued, with “the ascendancy of the corporate profit imperative in the news business…depth, breadth, and authority suffered.”[17] Fifty large corporations owned or controlled a majority of media outlets in the United States in 1981; by 1987, the fifty had become twenty-nine.[18] The Federal Communications Commission, which had been created in 1934 to regulate the media in the public’s interest (defined as having “diverse and antagonistic sources” to provide the public’s information),[19] under Ronald Reagan had decreased that diversity by changing the long-standing 7-7-7 rule – whereby one owner was allowed to own and operate seven television stations, seven AM radio stations, and seven FM radio stations – to a 12-12-12 rule, nearly doubling the owned-and-operated stations that were the source of the networks’ “vast wealth.”[20] This concentration of media into fewer hands not only increased the profits of the corporations but also decreased the diversity of information available to the public: “As long as we have one newspaper and only three or four TV stations doing news in most cities, we cannot rely solely on the marketplace to protect journalistic ethics.”[21]
The members of the media were becoming more reticent about being perceived as the hangmen at the decimation of yet another presidency. Collectively they felt that the country was exhausted by inflation, energy crisis, continuing Cold War tensions, and revelations of governmental wrongdoing from Nixon’s Watergate to Carter’s Bert Lance scandal. David Gergen observed:
The press in general was worried as Reagan came into office that they had been an unwitting participant in the destruction or downfall of at least two Presidents, and that they felt that the public was not sympathetic to their role. They were worried about losing viewers, losing audience, losing public support and being regulated. All of those were legitimate fears.[22]

Journalists were also reluctant to skewer a man that they liked personally. After the failed assassination attempt in 1981, Reagan speech writer Peggy Noonan noted, “…those who were meanest about him lost the quiver of their meanness, because you can’t be mean to such a gallant old man without seeming churlish or childish.”[23] Since he was perceived as so popular personally with the public, the press and broadcast news also wanted to avoid the appearance that they were “hounding the President in an undignified manner, instead of pursuing presidential accountability. This was a problem the Reagan administration did its best to magnify.”[24] Maynard Parker, editor of Newsweek, agreed that Reagan’s sunny personality could influence a journalist to be gentler on the President “for the reason that most reporters covering him genuinely like the man and find it difficult to be as tough as they might like.”[25]

The Administration
In a country where politics had increasingly become a contest of images rather than ideas, there was a certain bizarre inevitability about a B-grade movie star finally being elected President.
Mark Hertsgaard, On Bended Knee[26]

These were the circumstances presented to the public relations machine that surrounded Ronald Reagan. Michael Deaver, who had worked with Reagan from his time as governor of California and as his White House Deputy Chief of Staff until 1985, said, “Underlying our whole theory of disseminating information in the White House was our knowledge that the American people get their news and form their judgments based largely on what they see on television.”[27] This reliance on image could frustrate the ideologues in the administration. David Stockman, Reagan’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget and the architect of Reagan’s supply-side economic plan, used to race against evening news time when all attention turned to the network newscasts. “That was how they operated. Reality happened once a day on the evening news.”[28] The Reagan presidency’s media relations staff appears to have used consistent methods to control the President’s image: restrict access to the President, “manipulation by inundation,” use of “lightening rods” in the administration to protect Reagan from being associated with bad news, and the consistent repetition of message (either with accurate or misleading information).
According to Sam Donaldson, the White House correspondent for ABC News during the Reagan administration, access to the President was purposely kept to a minimum because “he display[ed] abysmal ignorance about current events.”[29] The Deaver Rule, whereby the networks were strong-armed from asking Reagan questions during any Oval Office photo opportunities with a foreign leader present (and which prompted a short-lived revolt by the networks) effectively muzzled the press during the one opportunity to directly question the President that was left to them.[30] Ronald Reagan held press conferences less frequently than any other prior modern president, perhaps because he was more comfortable with scripted and stage-managed events rather than with the risk being thrown off by an unexpected question or challenge. Michael Deaver had seen the effect of derailing “The Rhythm Candidate” while Reagan was running for governor of California:
…but just as we turned our back, an NBC reporter asked Reagan about the California ad…The rage was back…he went into one of those endless let-me-tell-you sort of sound bites that make any campaign manager’s hair stand on end. The rosy cheeks and the luring smile were gone, replaced by a purple tide and quivering lip…I was seeing The Rhythm Candidate up close and in person for the first time, and it was not a pretty picture. It would take us days to get the man back on track…[31]

However, this lack of access did not mean that Reagan would be absent from the airwaves. The networks’ demand for video of the President tilted the balance of power toward the White House, so much so that Deaver stated bluntly, “They had to take what we were giving them.”[32]
What the White House was giving the media was characterized by Deputy White House Press Secretary Leslie Janka as a “well-packaged, premasticated story in the format they want” so “they’ll go away. The phrase is ‘manipulation by inundation.’”[33] Journalists were given comfortable facilities, food, and attractively packaged stories, making it unlikely that they would break ranks with the rest of the Washington press corps and generate their own stories. “I had reporters…tell me ‘Jesus Christ, how can I write a nasty story,’” noted Joanna Bistany, Deputy Assistant to President Reagan.[34] By learning from the Nixon administration’s mistakes – making an enemy of the press, withholding news – Reagan’s people sought to domesticate the press, feeding them images that would further the White House’s agenda while restricting direct access to the President so it was difficult to generate stories on their own.
In fact, the format of television news, with its dependence on image over substance, was perfect for the White House public relations team. If the information provided by the average television news story were transcribed to written copy, no one story would fill even one-third of a page.[35] So the words that the President spoke were secondary to the images that were broadcast every evening, images that “strengthened the overall impression of control, comfort, and security.”[36] For a man who had spent so many years in Hollywood, delivering a memorized script came naturally. According to Reagan biographer Lou Cannon, “What unnerved reporters who spent considerable time with Reagan…was not his misstatements but his proclivity for repeating the same memorized answers over and over again in the manner of a mean who is saying them for the first time.”[37] Michael Deaver described the method that was used to further the Reagan agenda:
We would take a theme, which we usually worked on for six weeks – say, the economy…The President would say the same thing, but we had a different visual for every one of those stops. They see the President out at an auto plant because imports are down and American cars are up. They see the President at a high-tech plant in Boston because high-tech means jobs. Pretty soon it begins to soak in, pretty soon people begin to believe the economy is getting better.[38]

In 1984, Lesley Stahl experienced the visuals-above-substance philosophy of the Reagan administration when she aired what she considered to be a hard-hitting piece illustrating how the White House used “lightening rods” – administration officials that could deliver bad news and take the heat for unpopular policies or outcomes. While bluntly charging the President with manipulation and hypocrisy, Stahl showed video clips of Reagan with Special Olympics athletes, the elderly, and relaxing at his ranch, while he allowed others to break the news that budget cuts would decimate services for those with special needs and housing for the elderly. When the Marines were pulled out of Lebanon in response to the bombing of their barracks, Reagan went to his ranch and allowed others to make the announcement. Expecting the White House to react negatively to such a blunt piece, Stahl was stunned to receive a call from a senior White House official praising the story, saying, “Lesley, when you’re showing four and a half minutes of great pictures of Ronald Reagan, no one listens to what you say. Don’t you know that the pictures are overriding your message because they conflict with your message? The public sees those pictures and they block your message…it was a four-and-a-half minute free ad for the Ronald Reagan campaign for reelection.”[39]
David Gergen articulated the lightening-rod philosophy in military terms, likening the President to a four-star general who had to be protected in battle, even if it meant bloodying a few lieutenants.[40] James Watt, Reagan’s first Secretary of the Interior, became the environmentalists’ whipping boy when the business-friendly Reagan White House began undermining previous pro-environment policy. David Stockman was vilified for the more mean-spirited outcomes of the social spending cuts that, along with tax cuts and massive increases in military spending, were part of the Reagan Revolution. Reagan was able to stay above the fray because he was kept from answering for the effects of his policies on people, and his beloved image was maintained.
The principle of consistent repetition of a simple message made use of Ronald Reagan’s natural talents, honed as a pitch-man for General Electric in the 1950s, as well as the media’s desire not to be seen as hounding the President. In fact, except for a period in 1982 when the networks spent almost as much time correcting Reagan’s “gaffes” as they did reporting them,[41] – and which incidentally coincided with some of his lowest personal approval and job performance ratings[42] – this reticence on the part of the media was the perfect atmosphere for the President’s “shameless” repetition of “statements and stories shown to be false or misleading.”[43] Factual disputation of questionable statements was offered once and then dropped, while Reagan would continue to repeat the challenged statements as fact. It is doubtful, though, that Reagan was technically lying when he would state that the Russian language had no word for freedom, that his administration did not trade arms with fundamentalist Iran for the return of hostages,[44] or that his tax policies were “more beneficial [to] people at the lower end of the earning scale than to anyone else” [45] since lying requires the intent to convey false information. Lou Cannon noted, “The more Reagan repeated a story, the more he believed it and the more he resisted information that undermined its premises.”[46] However, the false and misleading statements were still repeatedly presented as fact.
The President was a master at the simplification so necessary to televised news. His “narrative line nearly always involved clear choices between two opposite alternatives,” always remembering the “importance of providing good visuals, usable copy, and” that “‘television thrives on simplicity.’”[47] Reagan included the audience in the “we” of his optimistic vision of an America of shared values, where hard work would always be rewarded and a thriving country required only the removal of the dead hand of government. Those who questioned his premises were excluded as “they,” an opposition that was “politically motivated, selfish, and self-interested, as people who love obscure, complex theories and programs.”[48] The repetition of simple ideas and facts – real or imagined – was the basis of Ronald Reagan’s reputation as the “Great Communicator.”
His most adoring followers did not necessarily view this massive control of the President’s image as something as sinister as manipulation. They felt that they were letting the public see the “real” Ronald Reagan, unfiltered by a negative press. As Michael Deaver said, “Even though I had worked with Reagan for nearly fifteen years when he ran for president again in 1980, I was still looking for new ways to let the American people see him as I did. I was convinced that if the voters could get an unvarnished look at Reagan, they’d pull the lever for him every time.”[49] He waxes poetic about the man he served for thirty years, “He knew that better times were ahead because ‘after all, we’re Americans.’ The nation cried out, and a guy named Ron answered the call…Clearly, Reagan was the right man at the right time, and history will bear his name triumphantly.”[50] A Reagan speech writer, Peggy Noonan, adds a quasi-religious devotion to her biography of Ronald Reagan. While describing the notes Reagan wrote during his recovery from the assassination attempt, one almost feels she is describing the relics of a saint:
But mostly there was the extraordinary thing going on in the recovery room, where he did something else regular people don’t do. Ronald Reagan, intubated, postoperative and recovering from shock and trauma, started writing funny notes to people…they had a kind of magical effect on the people there…
So we all heard about the famous notes, but in time a funny thing happened. They started disappearing. Some people held on to them….But when Nancy Reagan realized that they were authentic history, that they contained within them the moment the American people started to understand Ronald Reagan, she got them back.
…It was an eight-by-twelve-inch manila envelope. Inside were the notes, the real ones. I held them in my hands in the sun as the birds sang.[51]

The Reagan/Media Legacy
In researching the relationship between Ronald Reagan and the media, one gets an almost eerie feeling that Karl Rove, President George W. Bush’s close advisor and architect of his winning campaigns for governor of Texas and his arguably winning campaign for President of the United States, is reading the same page. There are almost verbatim phrases uttered and methods implemented by the Reagan administration and the Bush administration. Consider the following pairs, separated in time by approximately twenty years, the first of each pair referring to the Reagan era, the second to George W. Bush’s era:
“One of David Gergen’s pet theories about news management held that a White House could not hope to govern successfully unless it could get its version of reality through the ‘filter’ of the press and out to the American public.”[52]
“There’s a sense that the people in America aren’t getting the truth,” Bush said recently. “I’m mindful of the filter through which some news travels. And sometimes you just have to go over the heads of the filter and speak directly to the people. And that’s what we will continue to do.”[53]

“And Stockman himself boasted of repeatedly employing the Evans and Novak syndicated column, which he described as ‘a kind of supply-side dartboard [that] you could use to stick somebody in the forehead fast, if you had to.”[54]
“Newspaper columnist and CNN co-host Robert Novak said Monday that while he learned the identity of a CIA operative from administration officials, there was “no great crime” and that he was not the recipient of a planned leak.”[55]

“The problem was they knew nothing about the true substance of domestic governance. The California crowd – Mike Deaver, Ed Meese, Lyn Nofzinger – consisted of personal retainers and electioneering hands…they were illiterate when it came to the essential equation of policy.”[56] “They never read anything. They lived off the tube.”[57]
“Prof John J DiIulio Jr, former member of Bush administration, says White House values politics over domestic policy, lacking both policy experts and apparatus to support them, interview with Esquire magazine; says it has failed to achieve ‘compassionate conservative’ agenda; cites power of Karl Rove, Bush’s chief advisor.”[58]

Ronald Reagan’s legacy of media manipulation is alive and well in the George W. Bush White House. Simple, repetitive messages paired with attractive visuals – as in the “Mission Accomplished” official end to the Iraqi war on the aircraft carrier where the flight-suited Mr. Bush had just landed for the announcement – as well as minimized press conferences and unscripted interaction between the President and the media are ongoing features of the Bush administration and provide an attractive veneer to the continued decimation of the American political and economic system that was begun under Ronald Reagan.
President George W. Bush – the truest disciple of Reaganism – started with the destruction wrought by that political philosophy during two decades and raised the barrier even higher for revivifying the institutions of democracy. He further entrenched plutocratic governance by increasing the role of big money and corporate America in the government’s policymaking process. Through tax reductions that disproportionately benefit the nation’s most affluent people, Bush’s policies have moved the nation toward an ever increasing maldistribution of income and wealth and a further unraveling of the social safety net underpinning economic security, not only for poor people and those who are nearly poor but also for the broad middle class.[59]

It will take the outcome of the 2004 presidential election to see if the Reagan public relation methods still hold.

[1] Mark Hertsgaard, On Bended Knee, (Schocken Books, New York, 1989), p. 105
[2] Walter Williams, Reaganism and the Death of Representative Democracy, (Georgetown University Press, Washington, D.C., 2003), p. 44
[3] Williams, p. 46
[4] Hertsgaard, p. 107
[5] Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, The Elements of Journalism, (Three Rivers Press, New York, 2001), p. 113
[6] Hertsgaard, p. 66
[7] Gary Wasserman, Wasserman’s Basics of American Politics, (Longman Publishers, New York 2002), p. 225
[8] Hertsgaard, p. 66
[9] Ellen Grigsby, Analyzing Politics, (Wadsworth/Thompson Learning, New York, second edition, 2002), p. 209
[10] David Brock, Blinded by the Right, (Crown Publishers, New York, 2002), p. 44
[11] Hertsgaard, p. 68
[12] James D. Torr, Editor, Ronald Reagan, “The First True Television President” by Mary E. Stuckey, (Greenhaven Press, Inc., San Diego), p. 178
[13] Hertsgaard, p. 82
[14] Joe Conason, Big Lies, (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2003), p. 40
[15] Hertsgaard, p. 89
[16] Hertsgaard, p. 100
[17] Williams, p. 178
[18] Hertsgaard, p. 77
[19] Hertsgaard, p. 181
[20] Hertsgaard, p. 181
[21] Kovach, p. 181
[22] Hertsgaard, p. 171
[23] Peggy Noonan, When Character Was King, (Viking Penguin, New York, 2001), p. 193
[24] James D. Torr, Ronald Reagan, “The First True Television President,” by Mary E. Stuckey,
p. 178
[25] Hertsgaard, p. 49
[26] Hertsgaard, p. 46
[27] James D. Torr, Editor, Ronald Reagan, “The Myth of Reagan as a Great Communicator” by Wilbur Edel, p. 178
[28] David A. Stockman, The Triumph of Politics, (Harper & Row, New York 1986), p. 5
[29] Hertsgaard, p. 27
[30] Hertsgaard, p. 140
[31] Michael K. Deaver, A Different Drummer, (HarperCollins Publishers, New York, 2001), p. 66
[32] Hertsgaard, p. 51
[33] Hertsgaard, p. 52
[34] Hertsgaard, p. 42
[35] Grigsby, p. 209
[36] James D. Torr, Editor, Ronald Reagan, “The First True Television President” by Mary E. Stuckey, p. 214
[37] James D. Torr, Editor, Ronald Reagan, “The Myth of Reagan as a Great Communicator” by Wilbur Edel, p. 178
[38] Herstgaard, p. 48
[39] Wasserman, p. 233
[40] Hertsgaard, p. 32
[41] Hertsgaard, p. 139
[42] James D. Torr, Editor, Ronald Reagan, “The Myth of Reagan as a Great Communicator” by Wilbur Edel, p. 185
[43] Hertsgaard, p. 73
[44] Hertsgaard, p. 138
[45] James D. Torr, Editor, Ronald Reagan, “The Myth of Reagan as a Great Communicator” by Wilbur Edel, p.180
[46] Williams, p. 57
[47] James D. Torr, Editor, Ronald Reagan, “The First True Television President” by Mary E. Stuckey, p. 211
[48] James D. Torr, Editor, Ronald Reagan, “The First True Television President” by Mary E. Stuckey, p. 214
[49] Deaver, p. 72
[50] Deaver, p. 123
[51] Noonan, p. 187
[52] Hertsgaard, p. 105
[53] ABC News Online, October 25, 2003, http://abcnews.go.com/sections/Nightline/Politics/media_bypass031025-1.html
[54] Hertsgaard, p. 122
[55] CNN.com, “Inside Politics,” October 1, 2003, http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/09/29/novak.cia/
[56] Stockman, p. 12
[57] Stockman, p. 7
[58] New York Time Archive, December 2, 2002,
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F50913FB355C0C718CDDAB0994DA404482
[59] Williams, p. 269

My Purpose

2007-11-18T11:41:00.001-08:00

I will be using this blog to post papers I have produced in classes in the past and to work through my thesis for my MA. We'll see how it goes.