My media column in today's Rocky Mountain News compared how much coverage the News and the Denver Post provided in the pre-inaugural week for the most recent inauguration, versus Clinton in 1993 and Bush in 2001 (which like 2009, featured a change of party). Since the Obama inauguration was said to be "historic," I also examined coverage of two other inaugurations which had some similarities (in terms of obvious historicaly character) with 2009: JFK in 1961, and Reagan in 1981. The results don't provide evidence of a pro-Democratic bias, since Bush 2001 and Clinton 1993 were about equal in quantity of coverage, as measured by the number of staff-written stories. Indeed, the 1961, 1981, 1993, and 2001 inaugurals were about equal in terms of coverage. These were dwarfed by the amount of coverage for Obama 2009.
Newspaper coverage of Obama vs. Previous Inaugurals
Your argument for the historic nature of the Reagan inauguration could just as easily be made for the Carter inauguration -- our "long national nightmare" was over and we we once again had an elected president. I don't recall too much media hoopla, however.
What I think would be a much better hypo, the Hudson river crash occurs Tuesday at 2:30pm, how does the media respond?
I reassured a concerned gentleman in the gun store today that we will survive this and it might even prove to be entertaining. The press may soon be on the same footing as a woman scorned.
It will be oh so much fun when all the Obama worshipers wake up and realize that he is just a man.
The Jackie Robinson comment above gets the whole thing in a nutshell.
That's a defensible position, but one needs to take account of two potential counterarguments:
1. Mr. Kopel observes, correctly, that FDR campaigned on a rather "conservative" platform quite unlike what his New Deal would become. My question, however, is whether between FDR's election and his assumption of office, the scope of his new plans were announced, so as to justify one calling FDR's inauguration "historic."
2. The assertion that Reagan's election was more "historic" than FDR's benefits from hindsight--what Reagan actually accomplished--just as much as any argument that FDR's inauguration was more historic.
3. Didn't Carter initiate certain forms of deregulation, the spirit of which Reaganites would later enact? In other words, maybe Reagan's campaign was not as historic as Mr. Kopel suggests in his comparison with FDR's campaign.
HOw do you guys keep a straight face when you write nonsense like that?
Can you understand the relevance now? If not, I suggest you spend some time studying the civil rights movement and do some math to figure out just how recent it all was.
This is a moment of national crisis that dwarfs the challenges of 1981 or 1961. As for 1932, the Depression had been going on for years. This time, we are 1 year into a downturn and only a few months after the financial system nearly collapsed. As it still could, as trillions more in losses are unveiled in the coming months.
After 9/11, Bush had 90% approval ratings because most of the Democrats rallied around the President out of a natural inclination towards unity during crisis.
Good to see reciprocity from the GOP. Oh, wait.
As for Obama, just as with every winner he rode a major streak of serindepity and it will now be interesting to see what he can make of it. But it it wasn't Obama now it would have been someone, sometime, and that I really don't see as having any lasting significance.
Maybe youth isn't the most important factor here.
Just becuase he swore an oath to support and defend a Constitution that at one time considered him 3/5 a person--no, nothing historic about that.
More to the point, the three-fifths clause never addressed free blacks at all.
Oh, and Nicestrategy, the patriotic democrats rallied around their country, the troops, their flag and their president when the U.S. was on the verge of losing the war in Iraq, and supported the surge strategy instead of advocating ignominious defeat. Not.
No they didn't.
This is a moment of national crisis that dwarfs the challenges of 1981 or 1961.
No it isn't.
One can get into a chicken-egg argument about cause and effect, but at this point at least some part of any variation from past practices should be attributed to the changing role of newspapers in society.
I hate to nitpick because you usually have very interesting, cogent posts--but President Obama is at the END of what is traditionally referred to as the Baby Boom--and is, in fact, our third Baby Boomer President (Clinton and GWB being the other two).
Demographers usually count the Baby Boom as 1946 to 1964. So while the President's inauguration may be an example of Baby Boomer narsicism, it is not the first.
I suspect we will have Baby Boomer Presidents for the next 20 years or so (President Obama is only 47--but then again, President Clinton was 46 at the time of inaguruation).
As to the historic nature, I agree that President Obama's inauguration is historic--but so was President Kennedy's. Anti-Catholicism was very real even in 1960--and only 32 years before Kenendy's election, Democrat Al Smith lost his Presidential bid (though a strong argument can be made that his religious faith was not a decisive factor in the election).
He means the event is more significant to boomers, not that Obama is a boomer. But give him a pass. I agree with you, he's usually very cogent. This is just his BDS showing.
But Obama IS a boomer (as am I. Barack Obama is the first President younger than me, though only by a few months--So get off my lawn).
I do agree with him that Baby Boomers, as a group, are the most narcisistic generation in history--though the GenXers are giving the Boomers a run for their money.
I'd say it's not relevant for purposes of judging President Obama or his policies, and claiming that this constitutes historical naiveté itself is a demonstration of historical naiveté. Wasn't it Martin Luther King who dreamed that people "would not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character"? Until we can ignore the race of our Presidents when evaluating them or their policies, racism (albeit a much weaker and less immediately destructive form than historically, but racism nonetheless) will continue to prevail.
Whatever your political views, it should be clear, as an objective matter, why there's intense media interest in the new president. Your comparisons to Reagan, claims that racism is over, claims that technically Obama is a boomer just like W., etc. just come off as pathetic.
A lot of people consider Obama post-Boomer, and I think DW may be among them. I have no idea what the cutoff is for Boomer/GenX/GenY.... I'm such a dyed-in-the-wool boomer I define my whole environment by narcissistic projection. I claim everything and everyone I like. Which means for my purposes Obama is a Boomer. He's also Jewish and he's not at all happy with his Comcast service. For example.
You early boomers want to cast us late boomers aside and treat us with derision just like our older siblings did. Which makes sense since our older siblings, tautologically, are at least "earlier" boomers.
Sorry about your cable though. Have you considered satellite?
this was done in opposition to southern slave owners.
that at one time considered him 3/5 a person
this was done in opposition to southern slave owners."
Who wanted to consider the slaves to be worth nothing at all to anyone except their owner? That's real progress there.
If you're gonna get technical, it only consider's half of him to be 3/5 a person.
Thanks for getting this right.
You show your historical ignorance with your comment. The "3/5 clause" was insisted on by the northern states in the Constitutional Convention. The Southern states wanted the slaves counted fully, so as to increase their Congressional representation.
It almost certainly would have been Colin Powell 12 years ago, if he had wanted the job. Running against the hapless Senate lifer Bob Dole, Clinton didn't break 50%; Powell was viewed as the architect of the most lopsided victory in American military history, and would have put the black vote in play to say the least. No anti-black racist was going to pull the lever for the draft-dodging, dope-smoking, etc etc etc; they would have sat the race out. Their loss weighed vs the apolitical, African-Americans, and progressives who wanted to make history? Powell would have won 45 states.
It would have been interesting to see whether the media was more committed to reelecting the "first black President", or electing the first black President, but I don't think they could have swung it back to Bubba.
So I'm not real excited over something that only Mrs Colin Powell kept from happening in 1996.
Guilty as charged. I am working on it, but not really hard.
Obama is Xer all the way (as I've argued elsewhere on this blog, but I'm too lazy to search it up) due in large part to his being out of the country for all the formative Boomer events. Even if he is late Boomer, that part of the generation tends to have some more sense, if less, um, imagination. The Boomer vanguard decided during those events that they really, really wanted a black President and they may have had one already if they hadn't simultaneously decided to hate Republicans.
The Democratic Party hasn't always been, you know, exactly progressive on racial issues, although they like to pretend otherwise these days.
Still hate to quibble. I have ALWAYS considered myself a Boomer (though close to the end). According to Wikipedia (an useful source for trivia of this nature), the President lived in Indonesia from ages 6 to 10 (1967 to 1971).
I will state as someone who never left the United States in the 1960s that much of that decade's turbulance when right over my head--and as the child of a college professor I would be more likely than my peers to be aware of campus strife, though I only have the vaguest memories of it.
I do remember Robert Kennedy's assassination and the moon landing. While the former may have gone unnoticed by Indonesian school children, I doubt the latter did.
The President was back in the United States for the trauma of Watergate (of which I have many memories) and the ineptitude of the the 39th President.
I'll vouch.
Oh good grief! Why must you bring that aspect up? I've put up with the shock and surprise of having doctors younger than I am, and pastors, and even airline pilots. But now this--the least you could do is not remind me how much older I'm getting! :-)
The article you cited said this:
And the guy who said 800,000 also said that if the crowd was packed tightly, "there could have been 2 million."
And "a Boston University professor who is considered the leading authority on providing crowd estimates" said "nearly 3 million."
So your claim ("no they didn't") is a bit, uh, inflated.
===============
dave n:
Technically, you're right, but nevertheless I think there are reasons to view his presidency as the first post-boomer presidency. Voters under 30 picked Obama 66%/32%. So he's the first president to be elected, largely, by post-boomers.
And the GOP tried to raise boomer issues (in the form of Ayers, mostly). This strategy fell flat on its face. Even though it worked well last time (swiftboats).
So even though he was born prior to the 1964 cutoff, I think he has a post-boomer persona, and is best understood from that perspective. As anonanon said, "Obama's election represents a generational change." And as lm said: "A lot of people consider Obama post-Boomer." (And warner is correct that this is connected with "his being out of the country for all the formative Boomer events." Although it's really 'many' or 'most,' not "all.")
I think many people perceive it that way. So this tends to become a fact, even though he is theoretically a few years too old.
========================
anon anon:
I think you're the first to mention this. A key factor is that Obama is following someone who is widely viewed as the worst president ever. This understandably adds to the enthusiasm.
========================
bgates:
Please don't bother mentioning that Perot got 8.4% of the vote. This is why "Clinton didn't break 50%." (He got 49.2%.)
But I'm glad you raised the issue of who "didn't break 50%." Kopel's analysis compares Obama to JFK, Reagan, Clinton '92, and Bush '00. What's interesting is that only one of those prior winners managed to "break 50%" (in the elections that were cited). Here are the popular vote percentages:
49.7% JFK
50.7% Reagan '80
43.0% Clinton '92 (if half of Perot's votes were allocated to Clinton, Clinton's number would be 52.5%)
47.9% Bush '00
52.9% Obama
So Obama's popular vote is decisively stronger, compared with those prior elections.
And also compared with other elections. Since FDR, Bush I and Ike are the only candidates who managed (when running as a non-incumbent) to exceed the popular vote percentage that Obama got. All the following failed to beat that number (when running as a non-incumbent): Bush II, Clinton, Reagan, Carter, Nixon, JFK, and Truman. They all entered office with weaker numbers (in terms of the popular vote %) than Obama. And Bush II failed to beat 52.9% even when running as an incumbent. (But his 50.7% in 2004 was promptly called a "mandate" by Cheney and lots of other folks. Even though that was a strikingly low number, for a winning non-incumbent; almost every other modern incumbent either beat that number, or lost.)
So Obama's strong popular vote percentage is another reason to consider his inauguration worthy of more coverage.
- there is a change in party
- the winner achieved a popular vote of 52.9% or more.
Of course it's interesting to notice that Truman was unpopular at the time.
So it's common to have a swing from one party to the other (that's happened 8 times since FDR), but usually (6/8 of the time) the swing is not strong (the victory was with 50.7% or less). And the swing in 2008 is arguably even stronger than 1952, because the GOP losses in Congress in 2008 exceed the gains they made in 1952. So from this perspective 2008 is the most decisive election since FDR. Another reason why there's lots of excitement and coverage.
Ike, Bush I and Obama are the three presidents since FDR who have won large popular vote victories, when running as a non-incumbent (none of the other non-incumbents beat 50.7%). With Bush I, it was largely because his predecessor was very popular. With Ike and Obama, it was largely because their predecessors were very unpopular.
RPT,
You show your historical ignorance with your comment. The "3/5 clause" was insisted on by the northern states in the Constitutional Convention. The Southern states wanted the slaves counted fully, so as to increase their Congressional representation."
You missed my point. The count was only to increase the representation, not that the slaves would actually be recognized as persons for all purposes relevant to them.
Let me rephrase that,
JACKIE ROBINSON!!!!
Loury's implication is that this time, we might be getting a utility infielder with a history of choking when there's a man on.
Isn't it interesting how many people continue to promote the 3/5 myth. As if counting slaves for apportionment as one for one would have been better for slaves.
I can't imagine anybody over sixteen who doesn't know better, but the true believers keep hoping.
As Dave N and others have pointed out, but I wanted to make abundantly clear:
1. All free Persons (including free blacks) were to be counted fully.
2. The 3/5 person was a compromise- the Northern states, rightly, believed that slaves, having no vote and not being free, should not be allowed to give the Southern states more political power. The Southern states, worried about the continuation of slavery (see also Art. V, 1808 provision) wanted each slave to have no "real" rights but to be counted fully for purposes of representatives. The final allocation was a compromise, and a short-sighted one at that for the Northern states (giving Jefferson the 1800 election).
That some people on this board use it to argue some incoherent point about progress and Obama shows a basic failure of American History 101. If there's a few things I hope we can agree on:
1. Slavery is bad.
2. The South (pre-Civil War) was bad for owning slaves, and its a good thing they lost.
3. People.... who own people... are the evilest people.... IN THE WORLD.
I think there's a bit more here to the love-fest. One can start with ideology, mix in some group-think and add from there. Steinbeck via Jung called the syndrome a phalanx. I'll leave it at that.
Sorry but there are people a lot worse than that on this planet. How about those who saw the heads off little girls because they committed the grevious offense against Allah of going to school? How about others who kill tens of thousands because they wear glasses and are therefore too intellectual? How about the ones who starve millions because they won't collectivize their farms or read your Little Red Book? Or those who use ovens in an attempt to eliminate a whole ethnic group?
Don't get me wrong; claiming to be able to own another human is abhorrent. But I'd rather be owned than dead any day, but hey, that's just my personal druthers.
Although that was a nice takeoff on the the lyrics from a song by one of the looniest people...in the world.
Just to be clear, my use of the superlative (evilEST) was not meant to indicate any ranking on an absolute scale of evil; rather, it was an attempt to keep my words in accord with the song parody.
Anyway, the point is this- it doesn't really matter whether one feels that Hitler, or Pol Pot, or Ted Bundy, or random Islamic militant(tm), or member of the Spanish Inquisition, or Janjaweed militia etc. is more evil than a slave owner.
The point is this- slavery is evil. Can't we just agree on this? It caused untold human suffering, misery, and death (through the slave trade, beatings, and more). That some people misconstrue one of the two most shameful things our nation has done*, and the only one enshrined in our Constitution, to score cheap and incoherent political points is unfathomable to me.
*I'd say that we weren't all that great to the Native Americans either. We have a whole lot to be proud of; but not these things.
No sh*t.
Just imagine if the entire establishment media turned on Obama tomorrow and for the next 8 years deliberately downplayed anything he did right and relentlessly excoriated him at every opportunity. Then they cherrypicked the economic situation, and all the domestic and international events, even "acts of God", to exaggerate everything bad and ignore anything good and attribute it all to Obama's mistakes. Then they attack him and his family personally at every opportunity. Then Hollywood and television produced a slew of movies and shows ridiculing everything about him. And nearly every college professor used his classes as a bully pulpit to slam and slander him in every way possible.
Exactly how popular would Obama be at the end of his second term?
Personally I do not care for Bush or the job he did, but the fact that he is considered the worst president ever by lots of people has much to do with the ideological pounding he's taken by the left, who control most of the opinion-making machinery in this country.
Thx for the kind words.
"I suspect we will have Baby Boomer Presidents for the next 20 years or so"
And I suspect we've seen the last one. Boomers are good for a lot of things, but alas responsibility is not among them. We'll need more responsibility in our leaders going forward. I'm also guessing that war vets will dominate inordinately for the forseeable future.
Don't be too glum - with McCain's loss, the Silents didn't get any.
Beyond that, I lived in D.C. for three inaugurations (the first Bush, Clinton twice) and just missed a third (G. W. Bush), and believe me, the country as a whole is treating this inauguration as a bigger deal. The stories of people taking buses, doing whatever they can to be their on the day . . .
I understand that folks who don't support Obama wouldn't share in the enthusiasm. It's harder to understand how anyone could not see the genuine difference in enthusiasm. And in this case, the media is following more than leading.
By contrast, Obama was elected with a strong majority in an election where his party took huge majorities in both houses of Congress, so the election is seen by supporters as a decisive break with the past. Obama is phenomenally popular and has been a master of branding: there's a reason his opponents mock him as the "Messiah" or "the One." Moreover, it is a time of enormous historical importance: not only is our nation is in the grips of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, but we also face two hot wars and an ongoing battle against global terrorism. As a result, voters perceived the choice of President as enormously important, much more so than in 2000. And on top of all that, white men have been dominating the field for the past 43 games, and he is the first person to break that streak. The media have written more news on this subject because there is more news to be made.
Would another inauguration that included hundreds of thousands of ticketed attendees left outside, and thousands trapped in a tunnel for hours, with tempuratures below freezing and no heat, no toilets, and locked, guarded gates preventing them from leaving, have received quite so favorable coverage?
Or compare the coverage of the $43 million Bush inauguration with the coverage of the $150 million Obama inauguration. (Or was it $50 million? Or $130 million? Or is the right measure dollars per person?) But it's not the dollar amount as much as the degree to which the legacy press decried the wasteful profligacy of the Bush inauguration, versus the admirable pomp and celebration of the Obama one.
The point is that while it was historic, both the degree of difference and the quality of the coverage have to be considered too.
Jackie Robinson, strictly as a player, is a ton more than a "utility infielder". To me, he rates as the 4th best second baseman of all time, behind only Joe Morgan, Eddie Collins, and Rogers Hornsby. He's clearly a step above the next level (Biggio, Alomar, Sandberg, Lajoie, Gehringer, etc). He's as good a hitter as anyone that ever played the position (excluding Hornsby), and one of the top defenders ever.
In fact, you could argue that Robinson belongs in the same group as the top three. He's got a career peak that puts him in that company - he just loses out on longevity. While the late start to his career obviously isn't his fault, the gap is large enough that it's hard to say he would have been that good that long. He certainly could have done it, though. So, being concervative, I place him 4th. Either way, it's a long, long stretch to "utility infielder".
Now that I have work to put off, I got motivated. Irrefutable photographic evidence that Obama is an X'er at this link.
GG refers to the Greatest Generation, or what was the Greatest Generation until the Boomers got a black President elected in a country as backward and racist as this one.
I think though that the Constitutional right to import slaves (Art 2, Sec. 9) is a better target.
That's a tough claim to make. I'm not sure what you mean by respectable discourse, but Hillary Clinton tried to triangulate Obama during the primary with her "hard working" quote before WV. Likewise, many of McCain's commercials, especially the "chicks dig Obama" one arguably were straight out of Atwater politics.
None of the many attempts were successful. Just as the attacks against Kennedy weren't successful. But I don't see any way to distinguish the two situations. The attacks on Kennedy were just as "disrespectful" (careful about what you imply here) as the attacks on Obama.
In McCain's first ad he called himself "The American President Americans Have Been Waiting For." As if the other candidate isn't exactly American. It's hard to interpret McCain's words as something other than a claim that a black person named Barack Obama isn't quite as fully "American" as John McCain.
And on 6/27/08 McCain put out an ad showing Obama's face on US currency (video). This was before Obama made the remark about how he "doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills." And that seems to have been the point of the ad.
==============
charlie:
Where did you get the number "35?"
Eight years ago, the Telegraph was much healthier.
News no longer sells. The event, the celebration sells.
An interesting guess since in the past five presidential elections the winner had no active military service and beat an opponent who had served in the military in a combat zone.
Seems to me like the American people consider other qualities more important than being a war vet.
"Seems to me like the American people consider other qualities more important than being a war vet."
Hope you're right, but the Iraq War vets are getting better press than any since WWII and they're practically deified by many who don't like the Press. A key element of the Rahmulus D resurgence involved recruiting vets to run for the D's to blunt R attacks on the patriotism, or lack thereof, of the left. Looks like that worked.
And when vets are out in force protesting against you, as they were against Kerry, I'm not sure that's a valid data point.
What I found interesting is that the number that the Washington Post cited, 1.8 million, was supposed to be a National park Service estimate. But the Park Service got into political trouble for debunking politically inflated numbers so this is what they said:
So the Washington Post quoted a statistic taken from a source that used the Washington Post as the source.
Missed it big time, you did.
Perhaps one's perspective depends on when and where one grew up. I grew up during the 1960's in a hotbed of "the 60's movement" in California. I never considered race to be a big deal and figured most educated racists would eventually just die of old age if they didn't adapt their views before then -- it appears enough have now done so to allow a black President to be elected.
We've had black Supreme Court Justices, Representatives, Senators, and Presidential candidates at the primary level for many years. The previous black Presidential candidates that come to mind (Jackson, Sharpton, and Chisholm) were quite liberal and it seems that they would have failed for that reason alone independent of their race.
At about 12% of the population, one would expect one out of about every eight Presidents to be black - perhaps a few less if one considers demographics (education, criminal convictions, etc) which set a practical minimum bar for the office. Obama is the 44th POTUS and going back seven Presidents takes us to LBJ who was the 37th POTUS. Interestingly, this corresponds with the height of the Civil Rights movement.
What seems more remarkable is that we've never had a female President even though females represent about half the population. It seems if Obama's election has major historic significance in and of itself, its historic significance will be overwhelmed by the election of the the first female President.
Who knew? There are other sources of disagreement than ignorance.
"Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance --
these may be cured by reform or revolution.
But men do not live only by fighting evils.
They live by positive goals, individual and collective,
a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible."
- Isaiah Berlin
As usual, you're making things up. You're suggesting that WP got their number from the Parks Service. But they didn't:
And the Parks Service said this:
More crowd estimates are here and here. There's no question it was one of the largest crowds in DC history, if not the largest.
I disagree. The IHS Jane's analysis appears to have been the most scientific.
That 3/5 thing is too good to let go.
The nation, parts of it, anyway, were comfortable keeping large numbers of blacks as SLAVES.
The 3/5 thing was a way of counting them for congressional power. In the context, meaningless. To the unwary, a great, simplistic, wrong point.
If you define baby boomers as those being a part of the "baby boom", then Obama surely does not qualify. He has no older siblings, he never had to worry about being drafted, Watergate happened before he was a teenager.
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