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Vanity Fair with an excerpt from Zev Chafets biography of Roger Ailes.
… For months, Roger Ailes and I had been meeting regularly at Fox News headquarters in Midtown Manhattan, at his home in PutnamCounty, and at public and private gatherings. In that time I got a closer look at Roger Ailes than any journalist who doesn’t work for him ever has. He is plainspoken, wryly profane, caustic, and above all competitive, whether he is relating how he told NBC not to name its cable channel MSNBC (“M.S. is a damn disease”) or, in an appearance before a student audience, trying to recall the name of a CNN anchor “named after a prison.” (Soledad O’Brien.) Ailes, in his years as a political consultant, created images for a living, and his own narrative is constructed from the sturdy materials of American mythology. In our first meeting, he said he had dug ditches as a kid and would be happy to go back to it if the whole media-empire thing ever fell apart. Ailes is no more likely than I am to dig ditches (and a lot less likely to need to), but I got his point. He is a blue-collar guy from a factory town in Ohio who has stayed close to his roots. After I had known him for a while I asked what he would do if he were president of the United States. He said that he would sign no legislation, create no new regulations, and allow the country to return to its natural, best self, which he locates, with modest social amendments, somewhere in midwestern America circa 1955.
Ailes and Rupert Murdoch are very respectful of each other. Ailes credits Murdoch with realizing that there was a niche audience (“half the country,” as Charles Krauthammer, a Fox contributor, drily put it) for a cable news network with a conservative perspective. Murdoch, for his part, assured me that he doesn’t dictate editorial decisions. “I defer to Roger,” he said. “I have ideas that Roger can accept or not. As long as things are going well … ”
One moment of tension occurred in 2010, when Matthew Freud, the husband of Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth and a powerful British public-relations executive, told The New York Times that “I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’s horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder, and every other global media business aspires to.” A spokesman for Murdoch replied that his son-in-law had been speaking for himself, and that Murdoch was “proud of Roger Ailes and Fox News.” Ailes mocked Freud in an interview in the Los Angeles Times, saying he couldn’t pick the British flack out of a lineup and suggesting that he (a descendant of Sigmund Freud’s) “needed to see a psychiatrist.”
Murdoch often drops by Ailes’s office to joke and gossip about politics. “Roger and I have a close personal friendship,” he told me. Ailes agrees—up to a point.
“Does Rupert like me? I think so, but it doesn’t matter. When I go up to the magic room in the sky every three months, if my numbers are right, I get to live. If not, I’m killed. Our relationship isn’t about love—it’s about arithmetic. Survival means hitting your numbers. I’ve met or exceeded mine in 56 straight quarters. The reason is: I treat Rupert’s money like it is mine.”
One day during the 2012 primary season, Newt Gingrich complained that Fox News’s support for Mitt Romney was responsible for Gingrich’s poor showing. Rick Santorum had made a similar claim when he dropped out of the race. Gingrich and Santorum had been Fox commentators before getting into the race, and Ailes found their complaints self-serving and disloyal. Brian Lewis, his spokesman, asked Ailes for guidance on how to respond to Newt. “Brush him back,” Ailes said. “He’s a sore loser and if he had won he would have been a sore winner.” Lewis nodded.
Ailes was silent for a moment and then added, “Newt’s a prick.” …
Matthew Continetti covers the causes and results of the sequester flap.
… The sequester has yet to cause tremendous panic and consternation anywhere but in the executive branch, the congressional Democratic caucus, and, needless to say, MSNBC. And suddenly those Republicans for whom the president had no use, the old out-of-touch white men who were on their way to the dustbin of history, became bizarrely relevant. On Wednesday Obama invited Republican senators, including his old nemesis John McCain, to dinner at the Jefferson Hotel. On Thursday, Paul Ryan lunched at the White House.
What happened? Well, it may be that the president’s approval rating has been steadily sinking. It may be that economic growth is at a standstill despite the record performance of the Dow. It may be that the administration has found itself on defense on questions of civil liberties and campaign finance.
But I think the larger problem is that Obama, like reelected presidents before him, bought into the myth of the mandate. He over-interpreted the results of a personal victory in a status-quo election. Winning tax increases as part of the fiscal cliff deal boosted his already ridiculously oversized confidence. But he turned out to be wrong. And conservatives and Republicans might as well revel in this moment, before we figure out a way to spoil it.
“The American people do not give mandates,” Stanford political scientist Morris Fiorina notes in an article in the current American Interest, “America’s Missing Moderates.” “They hire parties provisionally and grant them a probationary period to prove their worth. A major electoral victory by the out party generally says no more than ‘for heaven’s sake, do something different.’” Such was the case in 2006, 2008, and 2010.
A victory by the incumbent party is less easy to interpret. President George W. Bush won reelection by 51 percent in 2004, but his “political capital” vanished as he moved to privatize Social Security and failed to secure Iraq. Obama won with 51 percent in 2012. His political capital seems to be diminishing quickly, as well. …
Joel Kotkin sings the praises of the material boys.
Something strange happened on the road to our much-celebrated post-industrial utopia. The real winners of the global economy have turned out to be not the creative types or the data junkies, but the material boys: countries, states and companies that have perfected the art of physical production in agriculture, energy and, remarkably, manufacturing.
The strongest economies of the high-income world (Norway, Canada, Australia, some Persian Gulf countries) produce oil and gas, coal, industrial minerals or food for the expanding global marketplace. The greatest success story, China, has based its rise largely on manufacturing. Brazil has been powered by a trifecta of higher energy production, a strong industrial sector and the highest volume of agricultural exports after the United States.
Things are really looking up for the material boys here in North America. Over the past decade, the strongest regional economies (as measured by GDP, job and wage growth) have overwhelmingly been those that produces material goods. This includes large swaths of the Great Plains, the GulfCoast and the Intermountain West, three regions that, as I point out in a recent Manhattan Institute study, have withstood the great recession far better than the rest of the country.
Today virtually all the “material boy” states now boast unemployment well below the national average; the lowest are the Dakotas, Wyoming and Nebraska. Texas, the biggest of the U.S. material boys, boasts an unemployment rate around 6%, well below California (nearly 10%) and New York (8%). One key reason: While Texas has created over 180,000 generally well-paid energy jobs over the past decade, California, with abundant energy reserves, has generated barely one-tenth as many. New York, despite ample potential in impoverished upstate areas, largely has disdained developing its energy sector.
These realities contrast greatly with the conventional wisdom that with the rise of the information age, the application of “brains” to abstract concepts, images and media would come to trump the “brawn” of producers, a thesis advanced influentially in 1973 by Daniel Bell in The Coming of Post Industrial Society. More recently Thomas Friedman has cited the East Asian countries such as Taiwan and Japan as suggesting that a lack of natural resources actually sparks innovation and economic health, while too great a concentration generally hinders progress.
So how is it that the rubes, with their grease-stained hands, reeking of the smell of manure or chemical fertilizers, have outperformed the darlings of the information age? …