Op-Ed

My fellow American media consumers:

     At a time when news cycles bring us such portentous events as the remarkable wedding of Britney Spears, the advent of Michael Jackson’s actual trial proceedings and the start of the Democratic presidential primaries, it is time to reflect upon the state of the media union.

     The achievements are everywhere to be seen and heard.

     On more than a thousand radio stations owned by the Clear Channel conglomerate, the programming quality is as reliable as a Big Mac.

     In cities and towns across the nation, an array of outspoken radio talk-show hosts can be depended on to run the gamut from the mushy center to the far right.

     Television provides a wide variety of homogenized offerings. With truly impressive (production) values, the major networks embody a consummate multiplicity of sameness, with truncated imagination and consolidated ownership. These days, there’s a captivatingly unadventurous cable channel for virtually every niche market.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Love those Iowa results. Nothing better than a huge political scrum where the front-runner stumbles, the guy everyone wrote off for dead six weeks ago comes roaring back, an unknown emerges, an old war-horse drops out -- a wonderful scenario. Let's hear it for upset, confusion and the conventional wisdom with egg on its face. A banana cream pie right in the kisser for everyone who pretends they know how a political race will turn out. Happy days. Ain't democracy grand?

            Not saying I necessarily agree with the conclusions reached by the Iowa caucus-goers, but I do love it when voters make fools of the pundits, including me. My biggest reservation about the result is John Kerry, who could take the excitement out of a soccer riot.

AUSTIN, Texas -- My fellow Americans, the state of the union's finances is enough to make an Enron accountant gag. When George W. Bush took office, he was handed a going concern. Projected annual surpluses from 2002 to 2011 were $5.6 trillion. In its most recent projection, the Congressional Budget Office says it expects $1.4 trillion in total deficits from 2004 to 2013. Bush's new future spending proposals -- including everything from the goofy manned-flight-to-Mars to the promotion of marriage -- already total an additional $2 trillion.

            When Bush took office, the national debt was $5.7 trillion and his first budget proposed to reduce it by $2 trillion over the next decade. Today, the debt is $7 trillion. Last year, Bush predicted a deficit of $262 billion. According of the CBO, the deficit is currently $480 billion. Bush plans to cut biomedical research, health care, job training and veterans funding, and that still leaves a projected deficit of $450 billion.

The father of President Bush the Second called it “the vision thing” -- which he was widely presumed to lack. By early 1987, Time magazine reported, George H. W. Bush was using that phrase “in clear exasperation.” Then, as now, journalists seemed to clamor for presidential candidates to seem visionary.

     Many politicians have grandly quoted from the Book of Proverbs: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” The biblical invocation plays into the media-fed notion that great leaders succeed when they persevere according to their own lights.

     But such popularized concepts of political leadership -- encouraged by countless journalists -- are long on vision and short on hearing. With apparent self-assurance, politicians often have a way of filtering out the messages they don’t want to hear, even from their own supporters.

 AUSTIN, Texas -- My long-reigning favorite Bushism has now been edged out by a fresh contender I cannot resist. The old fave goes back to Oct. 4, 2001, when Bush, still trying to reassure a shaky nation, said, "We need to counter the shockwave of the evildoer by having individual rate cuts accelerated and by thinking about tax rebates."

            I didn't think he could top that, but there is something so winningly confused about my new No. 1. This is from Paul O'Neill's report of the large meeting in November 2002 about a second round of tax cuts. O'Neill argued against it, noting that after 9-11 and the war in Afghanistan, the budget deficit was growing and the nation faced urgent problems.

            Everyone expected Bush to rubber stamp the plan, but he surprised them by asking: "Haven't we already given money to rich people? Why are we going to do it again?"

Like many progressives, I've felt torn between Howard Dean's and Dennis Kucinich's respective strengths. I've resolved this conflict so far by embracing my indecision and giving money to both. Kucinich has spoken out, eloquently and thoughtfully, taking stands that challenge the conventional wisdom of our time, and point toward powerful long-term alternatives. Dean's stands are more cautious, but he's revived the Democratic Party by being willing to challenge Bush on a host of key issues, and brought more ordinary citizens into electoral politics than any Democratic politician in years. When Dean says, "America is not Rome," it contrasts starkly with an administration that's tried its best to make us the world's imperial policeman.

Many pundits say President Bush is sitting pretty, but this year began with new poll data telling a very different story. A national Harris survey, completed on Jan. 1 for Time magazine and CNN, found that just 51 percent of respondents said they were “likely” to vote for Bush in November, compared to 46 percent “unlikely.” When people were asked to “choose between Howard Dean, the Democrat, and George W. Bush, the Republican,” the margin for Bush was only 51-43, and when the survey focused on “likely voters” the gap narrowed to 51-46.

     While other polls have some different numbers, clearly the race for the White House could be quite close. But one of the obstacles to Democratic success is the pretense of having a chance to carry a bunch of Southern states. Actually, for a Democratic presidential campaign in 2004 -- in terms of money, travel time, rhetoric and espoused ideology -- Dixie is a sinkhole.

     In 2000, the Bush-Cheney campaign swept all of the South, albeit with electoral thievery in Florida.

AUSTIN, Texas -- In Texas, where the border is a constant presence in our lives, no one is mistaking President Bush's immigration proposal for a brilliant new departure in immigration policy, or even for a ploy to get Hispanic political support. What we have here is the old bracero program, a guest worker program, and it primarily benefits one group and one group only -- big business. And that would be OK, if other parts of the program totaled up to a net improvement in the current situation. That's what we need to look at and weigh.

Ralph Nader plans to announce this month whether he'll be running for president in 2004. Some believe that such a campaign is needed to make a strong political statement nationwide. But if Nader does run this year, what kind of support -- in the form of volunteers, resources and votes -- could he reasonably expect?

Results of a nationwide survey, released in late December, provide a stark look at the current inclinations of people who've been part of his electoral base. After receiving about 11,000 responses from readers on a core e-mail list, the progressive online magazine AlterNet reported back: "While 27 percent of you voted for Nader in 2000, only 11 percent say you would vote for him in 2004."

This year, Nader would be lucky to receive 1 million votes -- a far cry from his 2000 total of 2.8 million.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Mr. Bumble observed that the law is an ass, and he'd never even seen the congressional redistricting plan drawn by Texas Republicans. Sigh. I just hate when Tom DeLay and Karl Rove get away with a dirty deal like this. The University of Texas is now represented by Lamar Smith of San Antonio, I'm in a district that runs to the Mexican border, and two blocks north of me, they're in with Houston. Help!

As one who relishes our state's incontrovertibly bizarre political mores, I must confess I love the sheer awfulness of this map. It is, in its own way, totally awesome and worthy of the truly noble tradition of lunacy for which Texas is so noted.

Speaking of said tradition, I have failed to give sufficient recognition to our only governor, Goodhair Perry, who is adding to the old je ne sais quoi in truly impressive quantities. Goodhair gave such an amazing performance at his end-of-the-year press conference that I was forced to call a perfectly reliable reporter for the Dallas Morning News and ask if it was a joke.