Patrick Kennedy's Orders from the Vatican and the Abuse Scandal

cross-posted at http://dagblog.com

The Bishop of Rhode Island has told Congressman Patrick Kennedy not to take Communion at Mass any more. They are now publicly feuding about whether or not the bishop ordered his priests not to give it to him. Forty-nine years after JFK promised not to take orders from the Church hierarchy, that hierarchy is sanctioning his nephew for not taking orders. The nominal issue is abortion. The underlying issue is the Church's sexual abuse scandal.

It's no accident that the vogue for Catholic bishops denying American Catholic politicians Communion, or announcing publicly that Catholic politicians should not take Communion, began in 2004, during the first national election after the abuse scandal came to light in the Archdiocese of Boston during 2002 and 2003. Nor is it any accident that the first major target of ecclesiastical ire, Senator and then-Presidential-candidate John Kerry, was from the Boston Archdiocese, where the . It might seem strange that the Catholic hierarchy would decide to strike the tone of moral condemnation shortly after epic revelations of child abuse and serial coverups, but at least some of the hierarchy reputedly came away from the national scandal furious that the Church had not been given more political cover by Catholic politicians. And the fall of Bernard Cardinal Law, who has since risen again in Rome, seems to be regarded by at least some bishops as a grievance.

To be fair, the Church has put some needed and belated reforms in place, as a safeguard against future child abuse. But those reforms do not extend to the mindset of the Catholic magisterium, which is very much a top-down, self-replicating hierarchy, and which has become far more traditionalist and far more centrally controlled during the Papcies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. (John Paul served so long that most Catholic bishops, and virtually all of the power players, were appointed or advanced by him, and reflect his own conservative and hierarchical mindset.) They certainly don't want anything like the scandal to happen again, and of course think child molestation is terrible. But the idea that their own autocratic approach to leadership, their lofty unaccountability, might be near the root of the problem is beyond them. The tacit principle that the bishops are to judge and not to be judged is deeply embedded in the institutional culture of the current Church. They mourn the suffering of the victims, but are still far from anything like insitutional humility or repentance.

This can be gleaned from the pattern of high-profile Church promotions since 2003, in which bishops who were fairly unresponsive to the abuse victims have been advanced, and many who were sympathetic to the victims have not. The most glaring example is Bernard Cardinal Law, leader of the conservatives among the American bishops, who presided over Boston's pervasive enabling of sexual predators and was forced to resign in 2002. In 2004, just before some American bishops decided John Kerry wasn't fit to take Communion, Law was appointed to a lucrative and prestigious sinecure in Rome (as cardinal archpriest of a basilica), and given even more administrative power in the Vatican than he had held before. In 2005, during the election of Benedict as Pope, someone apparently cast a vote for Law. As in, a vote for Law to be Pope. It came on the last ballot, when the winner was clear, and was therefore a strictly a symbolic vote. But since Cardinals may not vote for themselves, the symbolic gesture was not Law's own. (But could easily have been a gesture by Benedict XVI himself, who could only vote symbolically by the same rule.)

If Benedict and his Vatican have been warm and forgiving toward Bernard Law, they have been just the reverse to the Boston Catholic politicians who preferred the law rather than Law, and most of all to the Kennedys. Benedict was notably chilly after Ted Kennedy's death. And in 2005 the Vatican even took the spiteful step of overturning Joe Kennedy's annulment, granted in 1996. (This doesn't affect the legality of Kennedy's second marriage, which is governed by civil rather than canon law, and so late after his remarriage it's primarily a symbol of displeasure.) Time magazine even allowed one Vatican official to trash Ted K anonymously after the funeral:

One veteran official at the Vatican, of U.S. nationality, expressed the view of many conservatives about the Kennedy clan's rapport with the Catholic Church: "Why would he even write a letter to the Pope? The Kennedys have always been defiantly in opposition to the Roman Catholic magisterium." (Magisterium is the formal term for the authority of Church teaching.)

and

"Here in Rome, Ted Kennedy is nobody. He's a legend with his own constituency," says the Vatican official. "If he had influence in the past, it was only with the Archdiocese of Boston, and that eventually disappeared too."

That blind quote is absolutely delusional as an assessment of Kennedy's political influence, except his influence with the Catholic hierarchy itself. And the blindness of the quote is an enormous problem, since the American official at the Vatican is either Bernard Law's close colleague and compatriot or else Bernard Law himself. But the talk about lack of influence makes sense if the Mystery Cardinal is thinking of Kennedy's inability to shield the Boston Archdiocese from the consequences of its misdeeds.

Of course, the idea that Catholic politicians could protect the hierarchy from the abuse scandal is deeply unrealistic. Any elected official who seemed to sympathize with the coverup, even remotely, would be political toast. But it's only slightly more realistic to insist that pro-choice politicians, elected by pro-choice voters, abandon their supporters because a bishop told them to. But abortion isn't the whole story here. The point is for Patrick Kennedy, and other politicians like him, to be taught obedience.

Palin Mania and the Triumph of Narrowcasting

Sarah Palin may be very unpopular by any traditional polling standard. However, pundits are eager to explain that the important thing isn't how many people like her, but rather the intensity of her followers' enthusiasm for her. Sure, she may poll like Herbert Hoover in 1932, but the thirty-to-forty percent of the country that approves of her includes a hard core of fanatical support. That intensity, we are repeatedly assured, will give her political power, no matter how many people oppose her. Sarah Palin is officially popular, whether the rest of us like it or not.

Palin is popular in the way Star Trek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer are popular. Not many people watched them, or ever did, but their tiny audiences are loyal and enthusiastic enough to make those shows into profitable franchises. Not profitable enough to keep Star Trek on NBC's prime time, of course, but profitable enough for a cable-TV environment with dozens and dozens of channels. Palin, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is a phenomenon in a fragmented media world where broad audience appeal is no longer necessary.

If the current media is fascinated with her, that's because they are themselves the creatures of the new and more fragmented national media, where the goal is not broadcasting but narrowcasting: getting a minuscule slice of the audience pie. CNN, Fox, and MSNBC have small audiences. Several of their, ahem, "major stars" draw audiences in the hundreds of thousands; the most successful get a few million viewers. The talk may be about, say, Katie Couric's ratings being low, and Bill O'Reilly's being high, but bad Katie Couric ratings are still easily higher than good O'Reilly ratings. Of course, it's relative. Cable news is only expected to pull in half a million to three-and-a-half million, and network news is still expected to pull in between six and ten million. Of course, the exact demographic slice of viewers CNN or FOX or MSNBC pulls in may be more lucrative for advertisers. Of course, the small cable audience may be growing by double digits and the big network audience is declining from its old eight-figure ratings. It is very natural for media figures, like the media executives to whom they answer, to view popularity in this sophisticated, relative framework. But relative popularity is only relative. Ignoring order-of-magnitude differences in popularity numbers is a mistake. The top news program in America is still 60 Minutes, which rates on a scale that dwarfs MSNBC, CNN, and Fox combined.

The news media, taking its cues from the entertainment media of which it is a component rather from the world it ostensibly covers, has grown to overvalue the same secondary numbers and measures of "intangibles" that determine news products' values to the corporations that own them: momentum, enthusiasm, brand loyalty, growth. And those measures have their importance, but older, less sexy forms of measurement shouldn't be ignored. Obama's poll numbers may have slipped, relatively speaking, but the difference between fifty-something job approval for Obama and around fifty percent disapproval for Palin is, ah, not trivial.

On the other hand, one can make enormous piles of money in the current media environment by getting the attention of only part of one percent of the national audience. Narrowcasting is how big media conglomerates make their profits. Sure, there may not be that many Star Trek fans as a percentage of the population, but by current standards you can have very successful Star Trek films and excellent DVD sales. You can make excellent money with prime-time soap operas for teens on, say, the CW network, because a small slice of faithful female teenaged viewers is enough to sell advertising. Palin evidently sold 700,000 copies of her book last week, which is an enormous and lucrative number in absolute terms but still represents than 0.25% of the population buying her book. (Okay, let's say everyone lends it to three friends who read it diligently. We're up to a whole percent.)

Narrowcasting expalins why the newer media covering politics tend toward hyper-partisanship. It's not that there's a broad appetite for talk-radio ranting. In fact, those ranters turn most of the audience off. The point is that the radio host, cable news head, angry columnist or partisan blogger is only shooting to reach a minority in the first place; getting a small segment of the population to pay faithful attention is all you need. Cable news has precisely the same business model as the Science Fiction Channel: the people who want to watch this are a tiny minority, but they have an enormous appetite for it, and so that tiny slice is profitable.

To a narrowcaster, Palin Mania looks stupendous. The fans are so hard core! She's so fresh! And twenty percent of the country looks enormous when reaching only six-tenths of a percent suffices to print money. But American politics is still first-past-the-post, and that means national politics demands keeping support wide as well as deep. Presidential politics is inevitably broadcast politics: old school, like the MGM Lion, Cary Grant, and NBC Blue.

Palin's Window of Opportunity

So, the rollout of Sarah Palin's book has led to a flurry of speculation about whether she will someday run for President. That conversation, in itself, is evidence of how little the American political media listens to what it's saying.

Palin is an unpopular politician who badly botched her Vice-Presidential run. But on the other hand, she badly botched her Vice-Presidential run and is unpopular. She will never make a serious run for the White House, because she can't.



Is she running? Or just cashing in on the media ride? The answer, of course is both and neither. Palin's job is now Potential Presidential Candidate. Her media value depends on the perception that she may be running. It is in the media's direct interest to keep her valuable, so that Sarah-related stories and interviews get lots of lucrative attention. Naturally, they encourage the speculation that she's a candidate. And that's in Palin's interest, too, because she profits directly from that media value.

Palin is going to make a lot of money for as long as the press treats her like a serious political player. But her ability to command top prices ends the moment it becomes clear that she isn't running for President. It also ends if she actually runs.

If Palin runs, she will cease to be a potential contender and become just another defeated candidate. Her national stature will vanish. And after she gets drubbed at the polls, her standard speaking fee will plummet. She'll still be highly paid, but not at anything like the rates she currently demands; you don't get a $5 million book deal after you've been humiliated in New Hampshire.

Maybe Palin understands this consciously, and maybe she does not. (For the record, I believe that Sarah Palin is crazy like a fox. A delirious, rabies-maddened fox.) But she has a window of opportunity in which to build a large personal fortune. The amount of money she makes while that window is open will probably determine her lifetime wealth. When she runs for President, or refuses to run, the window will close. So it's time for her to make her money now.

Joe Lieberman as Fredo Corleone

Joe Lieberman has spent a lot of time over the past few weeks making a spectacle of his disloyalty to the Democratic Party. He's gone out of his way to announce that he'll filibuster against the public option, preventing the majority that gives him his committee chairmanship from bringing their most important legislation to a vote. Then, as if it weren't already clear, Lieberman wanted make sure everyone knew he'd be stumping for some Republicans in 2010. Just in case, you know, anyone mistakenly thought he was loyal to the caucus that gives him his power in the Senate.

My usual approach is to look for the logic (whether sound or not) behind seemingly irrational or quirky decisions. But plenty of other people have already taken their best shot at finding some clever stratagem buried inside Lieberman's operatic disloyalty, and come up empty. This isn't a smart play at all. Lieberman's constituents are solidly behind the measure he's threatening to torpedo, and behind the President he's defying. He can't get anything close to the deal the Democrats are already giving him from the Republicans, and while the Democratic leadership has been too easy on him there's no percentage in reminding them of that. This isn't business. This is personal.

Lieberman's frustrating and possibly self-destructive behavior is an example of the management riddle I call The Fredo Problem, after the incompetent brother in The Godfather. For those of you who aren't familiar with the movies or the novel, Fredo Corleone is not at all cut out to be a gangster like his father and brothers, but is kept around their organization in progressively-more-marginal roles while his terrifyingly competent little brother runs the business. Predictably, no good comes of this. The Fredo Problem comes from employees who, like Fredo, can't be fired but who also can't advance, because their expectations outstrip their capabilities. Keeping such employees happy is basically impossible. Keeping them loyal to the organization is nearly so.

The Fredo problem isn't simply about incompetence or about ambition, each of which can be managed. It’s about the horrible, unsustainable conjunction of the two. The only thing that a Fredo believes will make him happy is a job that he isn't qualified to get. In fact, Fredos are often mediocre at the jobs they already have, and can't go anywhere else without accepting a big demotion. So they're stuck where they are, and their supervisors and co-workers are stuck with them.

How does this apply to a man who’s a United States Senator, the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, and seemingly on the Sunday chat shows twice a week? The secret to understanding Lieberman’s behavior is that he expected to be the candidate for President in 2008.

When Lieberman was nominated as Al Gore’s running mate in 2000, he had to indulge himself in some fairly vivid and specific fantasies of running for the big prize, presumably as incumbent Vice-President, in 2008. That dream can be very difficult to let go of. And in each of the national elections since then, Lieberman has made efforts to get on a national ticket. He ran in the Democratic primaries in 2004, losing badly, and clearly negotiated with McCain about joining the Republican ticket in 2008. (Since McCain was considering Lieberman until very late in the process, and only dissuaded from choosing him at the last moment, McCain had to know that his friend from Connecticut would say yes.) That Lieberman would consider defecting to McCain’s losing cause suggests how unrealistically he evaluates his own chances, and how hard it is for him to give up his West Wing dreams. Even Lieberman’s refusal to use his Homeland Security Committee to rein in Bush and Cheney is connected to his own imaginative identification with executive power and his own fantasies of wielding it.

The hard truth is, since Gore made him a national figure, Lieberman hasn’t succeeded much at anything. He was a mediocre running mate in a campaign that did not succeed in gaining the White House. Lieberman certainly isn’t to be blamed for how the Gore campaign went, but neither did he do much good or make any case for himself as a potential nominee. His 2004 campaign quickly became a footnote. (If you don’t remember that he ran: Yes. That’s the problem. And the fact that everyone but Joe himself has forgotten has to rankle.) And then Lieberman had the humiliation of losing his Senate primary and having to run as an independent while begging for campaign help from his Democratic peers (including wunderkind Obama). The last nine years of Lieberman’s political life have been very strange. He’s been brought to the brink of national power, only to have it slip further and further from him with every election cycle. He’s been given the royal treatment by the national press even as his actual political career brings him increasing frustrations and embarrassments. In fact, the more poorly he does, the more the TV pundits revere him. The cognitive dissonance must be dizzying, and the cycle of flattery and rejection in ever-increasing doses would be enough to erode most people’s judgment.

Worst of all, from Lieberman’s perspective, is that he’s been leapfrogged by an upstart, Barack Obama, who was entirely unknown when Lieberman got his first addictive taste of national glory. (As Fredo Corleone puts it, “You’re my kid brother! I was passed over!”) To Lieberman, who on some level believes he should have become president, the ascent of a youngster who in Lieberman’s mind wasn’t even supposed to be running is a particular affront. And being defeated by a politician from a younger generation makes it painfully apparent that Lieberman’s presidential hopes will never, ever bear fruit. If it seems to you unrealistic that Lieberman could ever imagine himself beating Obama, or think of himself as the rightful heir apparent, well, yes. Unrealistic ambition is the heart of Fredo-hood. Honest self-evaluation, which is the only path out of the Fredo Syndrome, is simply too painful, and the Fredo fights harder and harder to protect his fragile ego.

(Interestingly, defeated Vice-Presidential nominees have seemed more likely to turn into Fredos recently than defeated Presidential nominees have. John Kerry has become a good soldier for Obama, and seems to find chairing the Foreign Relations Committee honorable and engrossing, even if he had hoped for more. Al Gore has turned aside from presidential ambition and found enormous rewards along his new path. Meanwhile, the never-ready-for-prime time John Edwards has devolved into a petty schemer who can’t even count the cards in his own hand, making Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton offers they can refuse with laughable ease. Sarah Palin, a running mate so bad that her damage to the ticket can be measured by polls, has become the most spectacular Fredo of our time: Il Fredo di tutti Fredi, or if one prefers La Freda del Freddo. Maybe it’s that vice-presidential candidates can blame their principals and fantasize about another chance, while defeated presidential nominees know they’ve had their last shot, and that they’ve made their own decisions.)

Obama’s challenge in wrangling Lieberman is comparable to taking a job managing an employee who’s applied unsuccessfully for your job twice, and then barely held onto his own job after your predecessor tried to fire him. Harry Reid’s job is even less palatable, like trying to manage someone who’s applied for your boss’s job twice, survived one attempt to fire him for insubordination, and believes in his heart that you should be reporting to him and not the other way around. If it sounds insoluble, it is. The Godfather films offer no solution to this problem. (The end of The Godfather, Part II does not actually represent a plan. The Fredo problem is simply allowed to fester until it become completely insupportable and ends with the worst possible result for everyone.)

Fredos are almost inevitably disloyal, even when the people they betray their organization to offer them much less than the organization itself does. The Fredo can be bought with attention and flattery, by making him feel important. The home team, no matter how generously they treat the Fredo, will always be a source of wounded pride. That Barack Obama helped Lieberman when he was down in Connecticut gets him less than nothing; reminding Lieberman of that only reminds Lieberman of being down. John McCain’s expressed desire to put Lieberman on a doomed ticket earned McCain attack-dog loyalty even though McCain didn’t follow through. Lieberman was willing to do the surrogate dirty work for McCain, who had given him nothing, that Lieberman had been unwilling to do for Al Gore when it counted. The key is that McCain treated Lieberman as a serious contender, White House material, while the Democrats had long since stopped thinking of Lieberman that way.

There is no way to fix this as long as Lieberman remains in both denial and the Senate. And, as Puzo’s Godfather suggests, disloyalty can become an identity that is nearly impossible to abandon. Disloyalty only makes the Fredo more unhappy with himself, and more resentful, because it makes it even harder for the Fredo to examine himself honestly. You might forgive a traitor, as Tom Hagen puts it near the end of Puzo’s novel, “but people never forgive themselves, and so they [will] always be dangerous.”

cross-posted at http://dagblog.com

Sports Are Serious

So last Sunday I was thinking: could Chris Berman be a political talking head in this country? And would he be any worse than the natterers on cable news, or the morning shows? I mean, Berman is clearly a silly and shallow blowhard, but that never stopped Tim Russert.

My suspicion, fully borne out this week by l'affaire Limbaugh, is that sports are treated far more seriously in this country than politics are, especially by our media. That a comment on the state of our political press and on our national priorities.

Rush Limbaugh is not serious or stable enough to buy into an NFL team. This is true. (And, to get the NFL's back, they're an association of private businesses, in a business based on publicity, and they have every right to choose partners who will reflect well on them and not create problems or damage their brand. You can't make somebody take a business partner.) However Limabaugh's fundamental lack of stability, seriousness, or basic politeness does not disbar him from discussing public affairs in this country.

Should this be a shock? Please. ESPN has already fired the man, for making divisive and intemperate comments. There's no place for a toxic clown like Limbaugh in the business of big-time sports. So he had to go back to discussing politics. (Where transparent race-baiting is not only permitted, it seems, but entitles the race-baiter to self-righteous counter-attacks on his critics.)

Dennis Miller, similarly, was not knowledgeable or lucid enough for Monday Night Football. So instead he has to talk about politics.

On the other hand, an ESPN personality like Keith Olbermann can make the transition from snarking about box scores in the morning to cable news punditry without seeming in any way less smart, serious or prepared than his rivals. In fact, by comparison he's the smart one. And while he too is a pompous, self-righteous and inflammatory geek (in the original sense, as someone who would bite of a chicken's head to get a moment's attention), he is only nearly as bad in this regard as his competition.

We don't take politics nearly as seriously as we take sports. We do not demand the integrity, the manners or the garden-variety sanity from our political commenters that we insist on from the color guy on the game of the week. And that, eventually, will show up in the box score.

cross-posted at http://dagblog.com