The number one single today in 1964 was performed by the oldest number one artist to date:
The number one single today in 1970, sides A …
… and B:
The number one British single today in 1981:
On the last Saturday in April, before a rapt crowd of cheering journalists and B-list celebrities, President Biden declared the American press an indispensable institution, necessary to the very survival of the republic.
Or answer them. My own object lesson at the state level was sitting in on Gov. Tony Evers’ COVID-era press conferences, to which non-daily media was first not invited until one of those non-daily media complained. The next tough question you hear asked of Evers from the Madison or Milwaukee media will be the first.
Jim Geraghty points to something endemic to Republicans, not just their presidential candidates:
Last week, Florida governor Ron DeSantis completed an overseas trade tour of Japan, South Korea, Israel, and the United Kingdom that was totally focused on increasing Florida’s exports to those countries, and purely coincidentally provided him some B-roll footage for future presidential-campaign commercials touting his relevant foreign-policy experience.
During a press conference in Israel, DeSantis had this exchange:
REPORTER: Would you like to comment on a report on NBC News that you are going to run, announce running next month?
DESANTIS: Was that sourced to anonymous sources? Let me guess, surprise, surprise. It would be nice to just do one article where you’re naming the people, instead of just doing the gossip.
We get it, Republican presidential candidates. You hate most or all of the mainstream media and think they ask stupid questions. The perceived high point of Newt Gingrich’s 2012 bid was when he slammed debate moderator Wolf Blitzer of CNN. Much of former president Donald Trump’s whole antagonistic, blustering, combative persona was built around “much of our news media is indeed the enemy of the people.” And as governor, DeSantis has had plenty of feisty interactions with both the state and national press.
And at the risk of picking on that reporter in Israel, it’s obvious DeSantis was not going to just blurt out, in the middle of a foreign trip, “Oh, yes, I’m going to formally announce my bid on May 22nd. You should get up early that day.”
But DeSantis is running second in the polls; he wrote a book about how what he’s done in Florida is a blueprint for the rest of the country; and Never Back Down, an independent Super PAC, is already running ads on his behalf and organizing support for him in key states. Everybody and their brother knows that DeSantis is either going to run for president, or he’s going to shock and disappoint a lot of people by choosing to not run at the last minute. When everybody knows you’re going to run for president, you’re going to get questions about when you’re going to formally announce your campaign! Those kinds of questions will stop when the prospective candidate makes it official. Then the reporters can move on to asking when the candidate will drop out of the race. (I kid, I kid.)
Can you run an effective campaign by only talking to a handful of preferred outlets? A few days ago, Politico laid out DeSantis’s close relationship with the Florida Standard, “an online conservative news outlet that instantly gained unprecedented access to DeSantis when it launched last summer”:
DeSantis has agreed to only a few interviews in the past year, usually with Fox News or established right-wing outlets. He’s made a show of turning down requests from places like “The View.” But the week the Florida Standard went live in August, Witt rolled out a 22-minute sit-down with DeSantis, a coincidence that suggested to many the outlet had ties to DeSantis supporters. In the interview, Witt openly praised DeSantis and allowed him to make multiple unchallenged claims about his record. Later, when DeSantis’ administration rejected an AP African American Studies course on the grounds that it was “woke indoctrination,” it was the Florida Standard that scored the first copy of the syllabus. National outlets like the New York Times and NBC cited the publication’s scoop in their articles.
Republican candidates, their campaigns, and many GOP presidential-primary voters are united in their contempt for those who ask questions during press conferences and debate moderators. But that attitude raises the question of what these groups want the news media to do during a Republican presidential primary. Do Republican primary voters have any questions they’d like to see their potential nominee asked? Do they just want to run this primary on autopilot, sitting back and watching a series of speeches and scripted applause lines, with no questions or off-the-cuff answers?
Or do some Republicans just want to skip the primary process entirely? A few days ago, Kari Lake — who still insists she won the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election — declared, “This primary is over. It’s time to rally around Donald Trump. We must focus our energy on exposing that fool Joe Biden, registering voters, and funding ballot chasing operations in swing states. We should not be wasting time and money fighting ourselves.” Our old friend John Fund observed, “This is from the woman who didn’t trust the polls when she ran in 2022.”
Trump says he won’t participate in at least one of the debates, although this might be his usual drama-generating tactics.
A lot of people on the right justifiably slam President Biden for rarely doing interviews and holding press conferences. If Republicans think Biden should come out and subject himself to questions that he might not like, why is it not important for Republican officials and presidential candidates to do the same?
As I intermittently disclose, I really like South Carolina senator and potential GOP presidential option Tim Scott. But even the most charismatic and likeable figures can have bad days and fumble in the face of direct questions that pin them down on thorny issues.
In mid April, Scott had an exchange with CBS News political correspondent Caitlin Huey-Burns about abortion that was less than ideal:
Scott: There’s no question that we’re gonna have a lot of folks talk about legislation from a federal perspective, but what I’ve heard so far, and what I’ve seen in the Senate, aren’t proposals, but those from the left trying to figure out how to continue their campaign towards late-term abortions, even allowing abortions based on the gender of the child or the race of the child or the disabilities of the child.
Huey-Burns: As a president, if you were president, would you advocate for federal limits?
Scott: Yeah, so once again, I — once again, I’m 100 percent pro-life, and I do believe –
Huey-Burns: So, yes?
Scott: That’s — that’s not what I said. I do believe that we should have a robust conversation about what’s happening in the, on a very important topic there’s no doubt that when I’m sitting in a banking hearing having a conversation about financial issues, and you have the Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen talking about young poor African American women having abortions to increase their labor force participation rate. I was stunned into silence.
Some pro-lifers — not all — will sense a contradiction between declaring yourself “100 percent pro-life” and then punting on the question of whether there should be federal legislation restricting or banning abortions.
The following day, Scott was in New Hampshire, and offered another less-than-fully clear answer on a similar question:
Questioner: Would you support a federal ban on abortions?
Scott: I would simply say that the fact of the matter is, when you look at the issue of abortion, one of the challenges that we have we continue to go to the most restrictive conversations without broadening the scope. Taking a look at the fact that I’m 100 pro-life. I never walk away from that. But the truth of the matter is that when you look at the issues on abortion, I start with the very important conversation I had in a banking hearing, when I was sitting in my office and listening to Janet Yellen, the Secretary of the Treasury, talk about increasing the labor force participation rate for African-American women who are in poverty, by having abortions. I think we’re just having the wrong conversation. I ran down to the banking hearing to see if I heard her right. Are you actually saying that a mom like mine should have an abortion, so that we increase the labor force participation rate? That just seems ridiculous to me. And so, I’m going to continue to have a serious conversation about the issues that affect the American people. I won’t start by pointing out the absolute hypocrisy of the Left on the most one of the more important issues.
We can all agree that it’s rather ghoulish for Janet Yellen to argue that abortion should remain legal because Roe v. Wade “helped lead to increased labor force participation.” But that anecdote doesn’t really answer the question of whether a President Tim Scott would sign federal legislation restricting or banning abortion nationwide if Congress sent it to his desk in the Oval Office. If the answer is “yes,” say yes. If the answer is, “no,” say no. And if the answer is, “I’m not sure, I’m still thinking about it,” let the electorate know that, too.
The presidency is not an easy job, and a candidate doesn’t get prepared for the challenges of running the executive branch and being commander in chief by doing softball interviews.
Do the people who work for campaigns, and those who most ardently support a particular candidate, think the purpose of the people covering the campaign is to make the candidate look good? Because if that’s the expectation, everybody’s always going to be disappointed. If candidates, campaigns, and their fan bases envision every publication and channel covering the candidate as gushingly as Breitbart covers Trump, or MSNBC covers Biden, they’re envisioning a political system with no independent press, just different varieties of spokesmen and salesmen.
Can reporters cover Republicans campaigns unfairly? Absolutely and indisputably. DeSantis’s foreign trip got mostly critical coverage, reminiscent of the harsh coverage of Mitt Romney’s 2012 foreign trip. But that trip including an infamous incident: Romney was completing his visit to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Warsaw, Poland, as reporters shrieked, “WHAT ABOUT YOUR GAFFES? DO YOU FEEL THAT YOUR GAFFES HAVE OVERSHADOWED YOUR FOREIGN TRIP?”
Let’s put aside that this is occurring just outside a national memorial tomb, the equivalent of shouting questions as a candidate is departing a wreath-laying ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery. Do you think that Romney thought his gaffes had overshadowed his foreign trip? Even in the astronomically unlikely scenario where he did think that, do you think he would ever say so to the reporters there?
There’s a middle ground between softballs and variations of, “Why do you suck so much?”
Notoriously bad campaign journalism stirs the ire of Republican primary voters, which makes press-bashing popular on the GOP campaign trail. But this also serves candidates’ purposes by delegitimizing any press coverage they don’t like, or any questions they would prefer not to answer. You, as a presidential-primary voter, shouldn’t just fall in love with some candidate. You should want to kick the tires and see how they do when they get asked tough questions — particularly when almost every presidential candidate just assumes they’ll have a cooperative Congress once they step into the Oval Office.
And if those who want to be commander in chief find interacting with the press too irritating and inconvenient, and if vast swaths of the candidates’ supporters find the expectation that a candidate interact with the press unreasonable . . . what is the point of this process?
Republicans and conservatives sound like whiny soyboy millennials every time they complain about the news media. i have to believe that Republican voters’ antipathy toward the media lost them the governor’s race because they voted for Tim Michels, who was a disaster in front of a microphone, instead of Rebecca Kleefisch, who as a former TV reporter was quite comfortable in front of the media and in front of crowds.
Ronald Reagan had no problem handling reporters, whether that was because of his comfort with cameras as a former actor or selective deafness when a question was shouted at him. Gpv. Scott Walker was obviously media-trained; I think his heart rate actually dropped when talking to reporters. Wisconsin’s newest Republican Congressman, Derrick Van Orden, has no problem with reporters from what I’ve witnessed either.
Yes, reporters are reflexively anti-Republican and anti-conservative. Yes, reporters ask stupid questions. Yes, reporters are the kind of people that normal people avoid like the plague. Anyone who wants to get elected has to deal with them. Whining abut unfairness accomplishes nothing. To quote Barry Goldwater, grow up, conservatives.
Today in 1954, the BBC banned Johnny Ray’s “Such a Night” after complaints about its “suggestiveness.”
The Brits had yet to see Elvis Presley or Jerry Lee Lewis.
The number one British single today in 1955:
Today in 1965, what would now be called a “video” was shot in London:
The number one single today in 1966 was presumably played on the radio on days other than Mondays:
Today is the anniversary of the last Beatles U.S. single release, “Long and Winding Road” (the theme music of the Schenk Middle School eighth-grade Dessert Dance about this time in 1979):
The number one album today in 1977 was the Eagles’ “Hotel California”:
The number one British album today in 1972 was a Tyrannosaurus Rex double album, the complete title of which is “My People Were Fair and Had Sky in Their Hair … But Now They’re Content to Wear Stars on Their Brows”/”Prophets, Seers & Sages: The Angels of the Ages.” Really.
Today is Cinco de Mayo, so some Mexican rock would be appropriate:
The number one single today in 1962:
I’m unaware of whether the soundtrack of “West Side Story” got any radio airplay, but since I played it in both the La Follette and UW marching bands, I note that today in 1962 the soundtrack hit number one and stayed there for 54 weeks:
Joe Biden’s video announcing his reelection bid makes much of his supposed defense of democracy.
If it weren’t for that, it strongly implies, he’d be happy to decamp to Rehoboth Beach to a contented retirement rather than stay on the job until age 86, guarding against threats to the republic.
There is no doubt that Donald Trump’s conduct after the election was a disgrace, his attempt to get Mike Pence to distort the counting of the electoral votes was a grotesque dereliction of his duty (among others on that day), and, if he’d gotten his way, he would have dragged the country into an unprecedented constitutional crisis, even if he was very unlikely to succeed in his ultimate objective of overturning the election result.
That all of this is a matter of record is a large part of the reason that Biden would have to be heavily favored in a rematch against Trump, although nothing is guaranteed.
Trump’s failings don’t excuse Biden’s lapses, though. One would think posing as a defender of our system would force Biden to be more fastidious about his own relationship to our institutions and norms, but that doesn’t seem to have occurred to him.
It bears noting, by the way, that Biden’s suggestion in the video that Republicans are bent on taking away people’s right to vote is a rank lie. This poisonous talking point should have died with the results of the 2022 election in Georgia, which served as a stark rebuttal of the claims from Stacey Abrams and the rest of her party that the Georgia election law was a Jim Crow (or, Jim Eagle) exercise in disenfranchisement.
Is it too much to ask some of the self-appointed information cops to whistle Biden for basing a pillar of his reelection message on a provable piece of disinformation? Why, yes, it is.
More fundamentally, Joe Biden has shown himself to be a determined enemy of the rule of law and constitutional constraints on the power of the executive branch.
This, too, is almost never noted in the press but is one of the most consequential aspects of his presidency.
Put aside the big kahuna, the student-debt forgiveness, which has no plausible basis in law, and the ongoing treatment of immigration law as a mere suggestion. Just consider the acts that have been in the news the last couple of weeks: the frank defiance of the Comstock Act prohibition on sending abortion-inducing substances through the mail; the rewriting of Title IX on the fly to include gender identity and to impose new nationwide rules on schools regarding males in women’s sports; and the distortion of the rules to make illegal immigrants covered under DACA — itself the product of an edict with no basis in the law about a decade ago — eligible for Obamacare.
All of this alone would be a pretty good record of lawlessness. None of it rates, but it should.
First, in a nation of laws, denying, ignoring, or defying the law is simply wrong, period, full stop.
Second, by further untethering the executive from lawful bounds, Biden is doing his part to reverse one of the foremost achievements of Anglo-America. Through a couple of centuries of political struggle, bloodshed, constitutional thought, and trial and error, we neutered the monarchy in England and created a chief executive in America embedded in a constitutional system designed to keep the position in check.
Third, in a two-party system, any action is going to create a reaction. The more Biden governs by willful edict and pretextual legal reasoning, the more incentive it creates for a Republican to do the same.
Fourth, ends-justifies-the-means reasoning, which undergirds all these acts, is inherently dangerous and can take you to unexpected places. (One reason that Trump couldn’t get his way after the 2020 election is that numerous Republican officials put the rules over their partisan interests and preferences.)
Fifth, government by administrative edict is itself a form of indirect disenfranchisement by taking power away from senators and representatives who were elected from a dizzying array of states and districts to sit in Congress and actually write the nation’s laws.
Finally, there is no substitute for presidents and other elected officials who take their constitutional oaths seriously. We have grown used to the courts as the sole arbiter of constitutional matters and the backstop against lawlessness. But they don’t always fulfill this function — bad judging and procedural questions such as standing take a hand (and the Biden administration has, in some instances, gamed the system to try to keep the courts from checking it). If the political actors are faithful to our system, the responsibility for preserving it doesn’t fall entirely on the courts.
Now, clearly the attitude of the Biden administration and the press is that a little bit of lawlessness in behalf of a good cause isn’t so bad. And so long as Biden isn’t trying to undermine an election result (although his side did that in 2017) or gin up a mob outside Congress, what’s the harm? But our democracy depends on more than simply holding a vote every four years. Lots of countries have votes; fewer have a system that balances and distributes power so you have elected officials beholden to a system bigger and more important than they are, rather than autocrats.
The republic would be safer with Biden enjoying Rehoboth Beach.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 