He Vox with me and he talks with me

From the Buzzfeed video. 

I wonder if Politico might be on President Obama's shit list down there around Maureen Dowd level, which is I guess pretty much where they belong journalistically, their "Tiger Beat on the Potomac" being just a tad more immature or less sour than her Grudge Report, because they seem awfully put out by the fact that Obama has given two rather large exclusives, on domestic and foreign policy respectively, to those brown-nose Vox jerks Ezra and Matty (you can just imagine Mike Allen: "Policy, policy, all those dudes ever talk about, that's just so gay!").

First Politico ran this review of the interviews, by Jack Shafer, complaining that they aren't adversarial enough:

they’re less interested in interviewing Obama than they are in explaining his policies. Again and again, they serve him softball—no, make that Nerf ball—questions and then insert infographics and footnotes that help advance White House positions. Vox has lavished such spectacular production values on the video version of the Obama interview—swirling graphics and illustrations, background music (background music!?), aggressive editing, multiple camera angles—that the clips end up looking and sounding like extended commercials for the Obama-in-2016 campaign. I’ve seen subtler Scientology recruitment films.

Then comes the National Review's Rich Lowry, who devotes his Politico column today (as BooMan noted) to comparing Klein and Yglesias to

a naively progressive Leni Riefenstahl, provided she believed in the totemic power of tables and graphs (always supportive, of course — a hint of disagreement might ruin the effect).

What a movie that would be, the procession of Ezra's awesomest truth-has-a-liberal-bias graphs! You could call it the Triumph of the Chill.

I imagine to the Politico boys this simple Godwining seems controversial and edgy and hit-garnering, rather than obscene, but more than obscene, it's silly. Riefenstahl's films were fascist porn, stark and grandiose images of ineluctable power, aiming at something like the Burkean sublime, intended to awe their audience with their irrational magnificence. Vox's charts and tables are easy on the eyes, but they're not meant to have that kind of effect on their audience; they're to contribute to the meaningfulness of the words.

To take a simple example: Klein wants to talk about Obama's role in political polarization, and he says, "You are the most polarizing president really since we began polling." Follows a footnote to a table that clarifies exactly how:

By gum, I see; that's pretty polarizing!

To the person like you and me, of moderate intellectual ability and somewhat interested in political issues (not everybody smart is interested, you know), that's what it is, a visual aid that gives us some information in a much quicker and more digestible form than prose would.

Why does Lowry object to it? I suspect it's math anxiety, like that of David Brooks or Politico's Dylan Byers, whose minds go swimmy in confrontation with all this data. The way I feel when I see a cinema image of perfectly synchronized Wehrmacht soldiers goose-stepping through the Luitpoldarena is the way Lowry feels when asked to look at a well-designed graph—bullied, dazzled, paralyzed.

Thinking about the Vox audience explains, I think, why the much more intelligent Jack Shafer (I've admired him before in these pages) is wrong here. Explanation, not scooping, is what Vox does. It's meant to bring the issues out to the person of moderate intellectual ability who's not desperately interested, in an easily assimilated and slightly entertaining form, and to make that person a more broadly informed citizen.

And an interview for information is a pretty normal thing in most realms. If you're interviewing, let's say, Meryl Streep, you don't throw her a hardball question like "Why did you give Thatcher a South Holland accent when she came from South Kesteven?" (imagining, for the sake of argument, that such a gotcha is possible). You try to get her to say interesting things, whether they're self-serving or not; you try to get her to tell you stories.

Why shouldn't you do something similar with Obama? There are a lot of things, you know, that we don't understand as much as we might want to from his point of view. Like the education policy (which Klein and Yglesias didn't unfortunately ask about), or the trade thing (which they did). I can learn quite a bit about what Alan Grayson or Elizabeth Warren think his trade policy is, and why they don't like it, but I haven't really understood what he thinks he's up to; partly because he's not willing to talk about it in any detail to a huge audience of the type that tunes into a campaign speech or a State of the Union address, and because most of his interviewers, Chuck Todd being the paradigm case, really don't understand enough for him to even try. Klein and Yglesias know plenty, and ask intelligent questions, which he takes the trouble to answer intelligently. I already had an inkling of what he's thinking from the last SOTU, and what he told Vox fills that in pretty helpfully:

There are a lot of people who look at the last 20 years and say, "Why would we want another trade deal that hasn't been good for American workers? It allowed outsourcing of American companies locating jobs in low-wage China and then selling it back to Walmart. And, yes, we got cheaper sneakers, but we also lost all our jobs."

And my argument is two-fold. Number one: precisely because that horse is out of the barn, the issue we're trying to deal with right now is, can we make for a higher bar on labor, on environmental standards, et cetera, in that region and write a set of rules where it's fairer, because right now it's not fair, and if you want to improve it, that means we need a new trading regime. We can't just rely on the old one because the old one isn't working for us.

But the second reason it's important is because the countries we're negotiating with are the same countries that China is trying to negotiate with. And if we don't write the rules out there, China's going to write the rules. And the geopolitical implications of China writing the rules for trade or maritime law or any kind of commercial activity almost inevitably means that we will be cut out or we will be deeply disadvantaged. Our businesses will be disadvantaged, our workers will be disadvantaged.

The first part is a little tiresomely familiar, in the sense that it's what they always say, "they" meaning "Bill Clinton", that the object of the deal isn't to secure advantages for huge multinational corporations but to gain protections for workers and the environment, but the thing is, it could be true, and it ought to be (there isn't that much work to do on the free trade aspect); and the other part really is true, about the efforts of the Chinese government to craft a huge mulilateral Asia-Pacific trade agreement excluding the US, which would certainly lead to a serious deterioration of conditions for workers in Bangladesh and Cambodia and all those places and serious degradation of the environmental regime.

And then, to understand the limits he's working under:

the story, the narrative, the experience that people have seen over the last 20 years, that's a real experience, that's not something we deny. That's why during the State of the Union address, I was very explicit. I said, look, not every trade deal has lived up to the hype. And there are real gaps in the current trading regime that mean there are a whole lot of Toyotas sold here and almost no Fords or Chryslers sold in Japan. But what I say to them [is] if, in fact, the current situation disadvantages us, why would we want to stick with the current situation?

Now, sometimes their response will be, well, what you're doing isn't enough; what we need to do is to have union recognition in Vietnam or we need Japan to completely open its markets and not have any barriers whatsoever, and we need that immediately. And I say, well, I can't get that for you. But what I can do is make the current situation better for American workers and American businesses that are trying to export there. I can open up more markets than what we have open right now, so that American farmers can sell their goods there. And, you know, better is better. It's not perfect.

He can say this stuff in a more perspicuous and intelligent way just because Klein and Yglesias know what they're talking about. It's not a lot, but it's so much more than we've heard, I mean not about this and that provision in a draft of the TPP but what his operative thinking is that's getting him there.

He never does get to the big sticking problems with the TPP, the questions about intellectual property and finance industry regulation, but the key to getting answers from him on those matters isn't going to be asking him "tough" questions and putting his back up; it's going to be letting him talk in those big paragraphs, as he thinks. We don't need to complain about this interview, we need more of them.

But the suspicion I started with, that Politico's just jealous? Yeah.