“Let’s be honest, kids are pretty stupid…Lenin had a phrase for people like these, they were called ‘useful idiots.’ I think a lot of our twenty-somethings are becoming useful idiots. One of those ‘useful idiots’ seems to be Meghan McCain.”

You’ll have to watch the video for Beck’s, actually sort of offensive impression of McCain (like, as if!), who I happen to think is a reasonably intelligent addition to the conservative chattering-sphere. For that matter, I have to wonder which twenty-somethings Beck has been spending time with of late that had led him to hold such a negative impression them (for what it’s worth, I happen to be continually amazed by the intelligence of the twenty-somethings currently in our office).

Anyway, the point of this whole, old cranky man diatribe, is that Glenn Beck is concerned that progressives are “hijacking” the youth of America! What has him up in arms specifically is this video from October of 2008 (Beck fails to note the time frame), which encouraged kids to talk to their parents about voting for Barack Obama, or explaining to their parents why they feel it’s important. You meddling kids! According to Beck, the message of the video is that “Mom and Dad are stupid, they believe in that crazy Constitution stuff.” Basically, Obama is trying to indoctrinate your children! AND. He’s disobeying a Commandment. Yowzer. Perhaps fitting he’s still in La La land. Video below.

The authors begin by rehashing the McCain campaign’s reaction to Palin’s Going Rogue back in November: “They saw in the book an array of the same qualities they had come to discern in her during the two months of the general election: the self-serving habits, the vindictiveness, the distant relationship with the truth.” And then suggest that the publication of Game Change has drastically shifted the playing field for Palin:

With the publication of our book Game Change and the appearance of Schmidt on 60 Minutes in a piece discussing our reporting, much of the truth about Palin has begun to emerge. The questions are how she might respond and what effect the turn of events will have on her future — a future which now includes a gig at Fox News.

Of course, this entire, somewhat skeletal piece was pulled together in light of that future gig at Fox News, just announced yesterday. In light of that announcement the authors ponder whether that fact Palin has once again been given an official public platform will she be forced to respond to revelations in the book the following issues revealed in Game Change? Answer? Not likely.

Her substantive deficiencies, even more dramatic than those that had previously been reported: her lack of understanding about why there are two Koreas, her ignorance about the function of the Federal Reserve, her belief that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. The fact that, at her lowest moments during preparation for her debate against Joe Biden, some senior McCain aides worried that she was mentally unstable.

All not nice things, clearly whatever restraint remained in terms of dishing on Palin was undone by the publication of Going Rogue and McCain’s camp was all to happy to reveal the worst. With that in mind, and knowing that most of Washington has been waiting for this book for months now, I suspect if nothing else (notwithstanding a healthy bank account) the motivating factor behind Palin’s choice to move to Fox News was that it provides the safest haven possible for her while still keeping her in the public eye. Even Palin must have known that the clock was ticking on her version of 2008′s events; it’s hard not to wonder whether her drastically pushed-up pub date had anything to do with Game Change‘s release. By getting out there early she could at least own the storyline for a chunk of time. Moreover, the timing of her Fox News announcement could not have come at a more apropos moment: instead of relying on Todd to watch the door at book events for errant bloggers she now has both the powerful Fox News platform and the equally powerful Fox News Pr team on her side. Seems like a win win to me. Almost makes you wonder how come the Clinton’s haven’t figured out something similar.

This is from the chapter on Sarah Palin (though I assume she factors in to more than one) captures the McCain campaign right before it made a left turn into Bizarro world. Here senior McCain staffer Nicole Wallace (whose relationship with Palin turned out to be somewhat rocky) recounts the first time she was contacted by a “real” reporter regarding the maternity of Trig Palin.

“’I will never forget the first phone call I got from a real reporter, from a real newsroom, about the maternity of the infant,’ Nicolle Wallace said. ‘He started asking me about amniotic fluid, and whether or not it had leaked … I said, ‘Are you asking me to respond, on the record, to a charge that amniotic fluid came out of her [body]?’ He was so mortified, he hung up.’”

Clearly that mortification did not last very long for most of the “real” press. There’s also an interesting tidbit on more tears from Hillary Clinton, this time off camera and in reaction to a cabler describing Chelsea as being pimped out. It apparently fell to Chelsea to reassure her mother she was fine.

Bookended by 9/11 at the start and a financial wipeout at the end, the first 10 years of this century will very likely go down as the most dispiriting and disillusioning decade Americans have lived through in the post–World War II era. We’re still weeks away from the end of ’09, but it’s not too early to pass judgment. Call it the Decade from Hell, or the Reckoning, or the Decade of Broken Dreams, or the Lost Decade. Call it whatever you want — just give thanks that it is nearly over. (See TIME’s photo-essay “The 10 Worst Things About the Worst Decade Ever.”)

Calling the 2000s “the worst” may seem an overwrought label in a decade in which we fought no major wars, in historical terms. It is a sadly appropriate term for the families of the thousands of 9/11 victims and soldiers and others killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the lack of a large-scale armed conflict makes these past 10 years stand out that much more. This decade was as awful as any peacetime decade in the nation’s entire history. Between the West’s ongoing struggle against radical Islam and our recent near-death economic experience — trends that have largely skirted much of the developing world — it’s no wonder we feel as if we’ve been through a 10-year gauntlet. Americans may have the darkest view of recent history, since it’s in the U.S. that the effects of those trends have been most acute. If you live in Brazil or China, you have had a pretty good decade economically. Once, we were the sunniest and most optimistic of nations. No longer.

Wow, cheerful huh? Before you decide to throw in the towel entirely (and yes, admittedly between the aforementioned, and Katrina, Iraq, and Wall St. it wasn’t such a stellar ten years) let’s take a small, glass half full approach. Because the Aughts (or whatever we end up calling them) was also the decade that brought us…I was going to say the Internet but obviously we already had that. So how about: the blog, the iphone, YouTube, iTunes, Twitter, Facebook, and Google chat. Just to name a few. However, those few have as fundamentally changed the way we live our lives and interact with the world as anything else that has happened since Jan 1, 2000 — arguably in a mostly productive way that will only get more so as we go boldly forward into the Tweens! Also, I think it’s worth mentioning on the glass-half-full front that the nation elected its first black president this decade, an accomplishment that appears to have recently got lost in the partisan furo that has recently taken over the nation, but as I recall, was a pretty happy event for most last January.

And what a fifty years! The opening chapter is packed with enough jaw-dropping anecdotes about the restricted lives women lead that it’s hard to believe so much change could occur in one lifetime, though thanks in part to the recent success (obsession for some) of Mad Men, the first hundred pages of the book function as a sort of companion piece to the show. You can read more on the book here. In the meantime, Collins was nice enough to take time out to answer Mediaite’s 5QQ (five quick questions). Enjoy.

1. How do you get your first news of the day?

I download a digest version of the Times and listen to it on the way to work.

2. The “either, or” question (you gotta pick one!):

Stewart or Colbert?
Colbert

Twilight or Buffy?
Buffy

Albany or D.C.?
D.C.

Palin or Bachmann?
Palin has certainly given me more columns although Michele is coming up there.

Eleanor Roosevelt or Gloria Steinem?
Gloria would want me to say Eleanor Roosevelt.

Peggy Olson or Joan Halloway?
Peggy.

3. What’s the biggest story the media has missed this year (or last week)?

I’m part of the media. If I thought there was a big thing we missed, I should write a column about it, not complain about it.

4. Obligatory Twitter question: Describe yourself in 140 characters or less (hash tag optional).

Columnist and writer of women’s history books currently in mental meltdown over twitter assignment.

5. Are you nervous or excited about the future of Journalism? Why?

Excited. The next generation is going to get to make a whole new thing. I’ve got total confidence reporting will continue to go on, and actually get better on the state and local level. And there will be entirely new ways of writing that will be appropriate to the internet. It’s going to be amazing for young journalists. But in the near term, try to find a spouse who has good health insurance.

Nicolle [Wallace] went on to explain that Katie really needed a career boost. “She just has such low self-esteem,” Nicolle said. She added that Katie was going through a tough time. “She just feels she can’t trust anybody.”

I was thinking, And this has to do with John McCain’s campaign how?

Nicolle said. “She wants you to like her.”

Hearing all that, I almost started to feel sorry for her. Katie had tried to make a bold move from lively morning gal to serious anchor, but the new assignment wasn’t going very well.

Snap! The truth of the matter is that those Palin interviews did give Katie Couric a much-needed career boost, the fact they also almost entirely delegitimatized Palin as a viable candidate, and pulled the rug out from under the McCain-Palin campaign in the process isn’t addressed in the excerpt. What is addressed is that apparently other than scheduling Couric McCain’s staffers tried pretty hard to keep Palin under wraps where the media was concerned. Full excerpt below.

HER TURN!
Fri Nov 13 2009 07:27:12 ET

Going Rogue: An American Life
by Sarah Palin
Chapter Four; Section 8, pages 255-257

By the third week in September, a “Free Sarah” campaign was under way and the press at large was growing increasingly critical of the McCain camp’s decision to keep me, my family and friends back home, and my governor’s staff all bottled up. Meanwhile, the question of which news outlet would land the first interview was a big deal, as it always is with a major party candidate.

From the beginning, Nicolle [Wallace] pushed for Katie Couric and the CBS Evening News. The campaign’s general strategy involved coming out with a network anchor, someone they felt had treated John well on the trail thus far. My suggestion was that we be consistent with that strategy and start talking to outlets like FOX and the Wall Street Journal. I really didn’t have a say in which press I was going to talk to, but for some reason Nicolle seemed compelled to get me on the Katie bandwagon.

“Katie really likes you,” she said to me one day. “she’s a working mom and admires you as a working mom. She has teenage daughter like you. She just relates to you,” Nicolle said. “believe me, I know her very well. I’ve worked with her.” Nicolle had left her gig at CBS just a few months earlier to hook up with the McCain campaign. I had to trust her experience, as she had dealt with national politics more than I had. But something always struck me as peculiar about the way she recalled her days in the White House, when she was speaking on behalf of President George W. Bush. She didn’t have much to say that was positive about her former boss or the job in general. Whenever I wanted to give a shout-out to the White House’s homeland security efforts after 9/11, we were told we couldn’t do it. I didn’t know if that was Nicolle’s call.

Nicolle went on to explain that Katie really needed a career boost. “She just has such low self-esteem,” Nicolle said. She added that Katie was going through a tough time. “She just feels she can’t trust anybody.”

I was thinking, And this has to do with John McCain’s campaign how?

Nicolle said. “She wants you to like her.”

Hearing all that, I almost started to feel sorry for her. Katie had tried to make a bold move from lively morning gal to serious anchor, but the new assignment wasn’t going very well.

“You know what? We’ll schedule a segment with her,” Nicolle said. “If it doesn’t go well, if there’s no chemistry, we won’t do any others.”

Meanwhile, the media blackout continued. It got so bad that a couple of times I had a friend in Anchorage track down phone numbers for me, and then I snuck in calls to folks like Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity and someone I thought was Larry Kudlow but turned out to be Neil Cavuto’s producer. I had a friend call Bill O’Reilly after I was inundated with supporters in Alaska asking why the campaign was “ignoring” his one-air requests for a McCain campaign interview. I had another friend scrambling to find Mark Levin’s number. Aboard the campaign plane I was within twenty-five feet of reporters for hours on end. Headquarters’ strategy was that I should not go to the back of the aircraft and talk to the press. At first this was subtle, but as the campaign wore on, Tracey or Tucker would call headquarters to request permission, and someone in DC would respond, “No! Absolutley not- block her if she tries to go back.”

Obama’s campaign had a particularly capable opposition research shop, a source of tips to many reporters, not all of them on policy. And Plouffe, in passing, outs the campaign as the source of a brief item I did in April 2007 off an Edwards campaign expenditure — probably driving as much traffic, chatter and grief as anything that short I’ve ever written.

“We did much less of this [opposition research] than other campaigns did,” Plouffe writes a bit self-servingly, “but there were times we indulged — it was our researchers who found John Edwards’s infamous $400 hair cut expenditures.”

It’s maddening when people assume political reporting is driven by opposition research when you’ve actually dug up something yourself, but in this case, I’m in no position to contradict Plouffe’s account.

So yeah, the Obama campaign, even in the very early days, understood the art of savvy, undermining campaigning. This can’t be a real shock to anyone. They didn’t win the election by playing nice all the time. How this same savvy campaigning will apply to future elections will be interesting to see. Last night on Hardball a combative Chris Matthews (who earlier took Plouffe to task for referring to the abortion debate as merely an important tree in the larger forest of the health care bill: “To a lot of people the forest is life and death, by the way!”) asked Plouffe why the White House only appears to be going after the likes of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh instead of actual, elected GOP party leaders like John Boehner. Says Plouffe (video below):

I just think it’s the reality. The truth is that the Palin, Limbaugh, Beck wing of the party are calling many of the shots now. They purged a moderate woman out of that race in New York last week, I think they’re not going to stop there…that’s where the energy is. And I think that’s really what the American people are faced with, a Republican party that either doesn’t want to cooperate because of politics not principle, or they’re largely just offering warmed over Bush policies which have been soundly rejected.

If that still holds true in another six months or so, we’ll have a good idea where the inevitable Sarah Palin haircut stories are coming from.

Before it became clear that Mayor Bloomberg was thisclose to losing the NYC mayoral race (thus making yesterday’s election actually compelling), I opined in our liveblog that I was not sold on “any of these races being huge, or any more significant than they have been in past years. I think we’re all just election junkies.” And the coverage of last night would appear to prove me out. Check out this rundown of cable coverage as listed on Mike Allen’s Playbook (3/4 of the way down). This for a small election that’s not even a midterm and will arguably have next to zero effect on 2012! Apparently the future of journalism is politics. Can anyone remember this level of attention being paid for a handful of local elections? I can remember presidential elections that barely got this level of coverage (Clinton/Dole anyone?).

Anyway, it would seem that despite a lot of wringing of hands at the end of last year’s actually historic election season about what certain media organizations were going to do when they had no election to cover, the answer increasingly appears to be that they will merely find other elections and/or turn everything into a race. Perhaps the real real result of Barack Obama’s record-breaking campaign has been to switch our national pastime.

It occurred to me when I was doing a ‘Year Of Obama’ post yesterday that perhaps the White House had sussed out this national addiction long before anyone else managed to put their finger on it and that was the real reason they turned Fox into some sort of rival, and successfully managed to submerge the news cycle for the last three weeks with a lot of campaign-like coverage. In short the lesson is, if you want a successful career in journalism best to find Politics as quickly as possible. You have a least six months before we start winding up for the midterms.

Related:
Journalism In 2009: The Year Of The Big Easy
Time For Obama To Pitch His Health Care Plan Kanye West-Style

Luckily for hypothetical Barack Obama, if the election were held today, somebody would have to get 45% of the vote in order to beat him.

While a poll like this unquestionably bespeaks a deep dissatisfaction among Americans, it doesn’t tell the whole story. According to a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, not only is there a lot more of this sandwich to go around, President Obama gets a relatively small bite of it.

That poll pegs Republican Party favorability at 25% versus 46% unfavorable, while the Democrats are at 42% favorable, 36% unfavorable. On health care reform, 64% disapprove of the job Republicans in Congress are doing. By a 46%-38% margin, voters hope the Democrats retain control of congress in 2010.

The Republican Party’s most visible star, Sarah Palin, has a 27% approval rating in this poll, enough to eke past Nancy Pelosi. Even in a CNN poll that has her at 44% approval, 71% say she’s not qualified to be president.

What this poll really means is that the country is messed up, and people want it to get fixed more quickly than it is, as quickly as they hoped it would. President Obama is only losing to candidate Obama. The thing is, problems like the economy and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were never supposed to be solved in nine months.

The Republican strategy of trying to win every news cycle may be taking a toll on Obama now, but they need to offer Americans something they like better. They’re certainly not doing that now.

Rice, an Oklahoma native who lost a brother on 9/11, had initially wanted to do a documentary about Howard Dean, but got sidetracked once she heard Obama’s speech. Eventually she brought filmmaker Alicia Sams and producer Edward Norton (yes, that Edward Norton) and to make a very long, hard, campaign story short, they were able to make the documentary of a lifetime. By the People: The Election of Barack Obama premieres tonight on HBO (trailer below). Rice and Sams were kind enough to answer our 5QQ – Five Quick Questions whilst in the middle of a media blitz.

1. How do you get your first news of the day?

Amy: First the BBC website, then the NYTimes website, next Drudge Report, then some Morning Joe on MSNBC.

Alicia: My husband reads me the headlines off his blackberry in bed, then my NPR alarm goes off, and then I read the NYTimes newspaper.

2. Either, Or (you gotta pick one!):

War Room or Journeys With George?

Amy: War Room!
Alicia: War Room

Dreams From My Father or The Audacity of Hope?

Amy: Dreams From My Father
Alicia: Dreams From My Father

2004 Speech or Race Speech?

Amy: 2004 Speech
Alicia: 2004 Speech

Obama Girl or Will.i.am?

Amy: Will.i.am (Obama Girl, Really?)
Alicia: Will.i.am

Plouffe or Axelrod?

Amy: Plouffe or Ax?? How do you choose??
Alicia: Plouffe or Ax- that’s Sophie’s choice

Iowa or New Hampshire?

Amy: New Hampshire. It was the greatest lesson for the Obama camp and extended the primary (and our narrative more importantly), which totally prepared them for the general election.
Alicia: Iowa (I just love Iowa)

3. What’s the biggest story the media has missed this year? (Or last week):

Amy: Biggest story the media has missed this year – totally the Jon and Kate Plus 8 story, why isn’t anybody writing about this?

Alicia: Glenn Beck’s alien love child

4. Obligatory Twitter Question: Describe yourself in 140 characters or
less (hash tag optional!)

Amy: Tired

Alicia: Tired

5. Are you nervous or excited about the future of journalism? Why?

Amy: I’m nervous about the state of journalism due to the economic challenges our media is facing, combined with the pressures and demands from the 24 hour news cycle. What we call news has changed a lot since my parents used to read the paper with us around the breakfast table.

Alicia: Yes, because I like holding a newspaper in my hands, and I hope journalists can afford to maintain their independence.

Bonus question: Your favorite memory from the campaign trail.

Amy and Alicia: Obama wins Iowa

The national political mood of Election Day 2009 would likely not be recognizable to the Obama-happy nation of 12 months ago. What a difference, etc. And yet, it’s hard to believe it’s only been 12 months! And a mere nine-and-a-half months of actual presidency. And truly it is only a slight exaggeration to say that in the interim it’s been all Obama, all the time. With that in mind let’s take a look back at the Barack Obama highlights (and some lowlights) of the last year.

>>>NEXT: Election Night November 4, 2008

Related:
Meeting the Bushes

The Inauguration

Barack Obama Saves Print Media

They Kill Flies, Don’t They?

The Beer Summit of 2009

Of Tea Parties And Town Halls

You Lie!

Jackass!

The War Against Fox News

The Rasmussen poll finds that “45% of adults say they would be at least somewhat likely to vote for Obama if he was up for reelection right now. Forty-nine percent (49%) say they would be unlikely to vote for the president’s reelection.” Ouch. Side note: more women like him than men.

Of course, it should go without saying that a poll like this is held in a vacuum, which does not include real world contributing factors like opposing candidates or running mates. Not to mention the next chance voters will get to check the President’s name off on a ballot is still three years off — needless to say, a lot can change in three years! — but still, probably not exactly the way Obama wanted to arrive at election day 2009!

For her part, Arianna Huffington, whose coverage of Obama during the campaign was generally, shall we say, positive, also appears to have decamped into the less-than-thrilled party. Huffington has penned a new post titled ‘The Audacity of Winning vs. The Timidity of Governing.’ From the post:

How did the candidate who got into the race because he’d decided that “the core leadership had turned rotten” and that “the people were getting hosed” become the president who has decided that the American people can only have as much change as Olympia Snowe will allow?

How did the candidate who told a stadium of supporters in Denver that “the greatest risk we can take is to try the same old politics with the same old players and expect a different result” become the president who has surrounded himself with the same old players trying the same old politics, expecting a different result?

The audacity of reality? No doubt the difference the next 36 months can make will help people make up their minds on that one.

Plouffe was Obama’s campaign manager during the 2008 election and judging from the excerpts that have been thus far released, it promises to be an interesting read. One of the tidbits getting a lot of coverage today is the fact that Obama very seriously considered choosing Hillary Clinton for VP before opting for Joe Biden (who apparently launched into a 20 minute monologue during their first meeting).

However, it is this passage about Sarah Palin (in which, Anita Dunn makes a guest appearance!), that caught the eye. Primarily because the Obama team was so silent on the Palin phenomenon while it was happening that it’s fascinating to get a glimpse of what they were thinking at the time, but also because it suggests how they might deal with her going forward as she reinserts herself back in the national conversation. Interestingly, the consensus at the time was that Palin was “clearly not up to this moment…but bound to be a compelling player and a real headliner in the weeks ahead.”

“With the Palin pick, [Senator McCain] had completely undermined his core argument against us. Worse yet for McCain, he would look inherently political in doing so. His strength—and the threat he posed to us—was rooted in the fact that many independent voters believed in his maverick reputation and believed he did not make his decisions by prioritizing politics over what was right. I guessed people would view this choice more as a political stunt than a sound, reasoned call. On our 6:00 a.m. conference call, [campaign adviser] Anita Dunn, who had worked against Palin in Alaska in the 2006 governor’s race, warned us that she was a formidable political talent—clearly not up to this moment, she assured us, but bound to be a compelling player and a real headliner in the weeks ahead. ‘All of you on this call should watch video of her debates and speeches,’ Dunn counseled. ‘The substance is thin, but she’s a very able performer. And her story is out of Hollywood. She’ll be a phenomenon for a while.’ …

“Obama and I had a long talk late that afternoon to evaluate Palin. ‘I just don’t understand how this ends up working out for McCain,’ he said. ‘In the long term, I mean. The short term will be good for them. But when voters step back and analyze how he made this decision, I think he’s going to be in big trouble. You just can’t wing something like this—it’s too important. … I think we just need to sit back and play our game,’ said Obama. ‘It actually won’t be bad to be off-Broadway for a few days. We should just leave her out of the equation. This is a race between John McCain and me. To the extent we talk about Palin, I think it should be about the differences in our selection processes—it illuminates differences in how we’d make decisions in the White House.’”

(h/t Playbook)

No more! News just hit the wires that Oprah will be interviewing the former Governor of Alaska on Monday, Nov. 16. the day before her memoir Going Rogue is released. Oprah’s no lightweight when it comes to interviews, and one imagines there are at least a few questions about Sarah Palin’s ‘death panel’ assertions in store for the ‘wonder from Wasilla.’

Anyway, it’s done. “Going Rogue: An American Life” is due to hit bookstores on November 17, months ahead of the original publication date, which was this spring. Seems that Palin has been putting all the extra, non-governmental, free time to good use! The ‘rogue’ part, you may recall, was a pundit meme employed in the fall of 2008 when it looked like Palin was doing damage to McCain’s campaign by not playing by his rules. Also known as the time it became glaringly apparent McCain had made an irresponsible choice and Palin was way out of her depth.

The timing of the book is great for the publishing industry since it will allow them to capitalize on the holiday sales rush, but questionable where Palin herself is concerned. If indeed the Wasilla Wonder is planning on making a 2012 run, and it seems almost a certainty that she will, than December 2009 seems rather early in the game to be using up the nation’s attention span with a memoir of this magnitude. Of course, perhaps Palin needs the money the book sales will generate. Or wants to clear the air and establish a new narrative going forward (and stop allowing Levi run his own sort of ‘rogue’). Or maybe she’s just taken the national temperature and realized that her death paneling was so successful she should strike the iron while it is hot!

Previously in ‘rogue’:

Both HuffPo, and most notably Politico, hitched their plans for success to the elevated interest in the nation’s politics and many media watchers wondered how they would make up the difference once the almost 2-year election was over and readership inevitably dropped. (One answer: slideshows!)

Turns out there wasn’t as much of a difference to make up as people thought! According to a new Gallup poll everyone’s interest in the election was not merely a passing fancy, seems a lot of folks got hooked.

Americans are paying closer attention to political news today than in any year without a presidential election since Gallup began regularly tracking this measure in 2001. The 36% of Americans who today say they follow news about national politics “very closely” is down from the record-high 43% Gallup found in September 2008, but matches the level found in September 2004 — two polls conducted during presidential election years.

Another interesting nugget that may not entirely surprise fans of Fox: apparently Republicans and Independents are (slightly) “more plugged in” than Democrats. And we mean slightly. Basically half of us are obsessed with the Beltway and the rest of us are…watching TMZ?