He Said, She Said Journalism Short Changes the Debate on New Convention Center It's a common enough lament that national reporters who strive to be "fair and balanced" do a disservice to the truth when they serve as stenographers for both sides of an argument, juxtaposing what one side says against the other, without providing any context to either side's remarks. The problem, of course, is that these reporters don't bother to fact-check their sources or to provide their readers with, well, real reporting, which involves asking follow up questions and placing each side's answers into a bigger picture. Instead, the reporters merely provide a forum for both sides and allow misleading assertions to stand uninterrogated, until eventually these assertions, in all their falsehood, gain traction as accepted fact and appear in story after story the the background narrative on the problem being covered. With this kind of reporting, the side that repeats its untruth most often and with the most volume wins, and all of the context that the opposition would attempt to provide to debunk this untruth is merely, well, so much effete hair-splitting. For a primer on the perils of this kind of reporting on a local level, check out this Plain Dealer article on the dearth of bookings at the Cleveland Convention Center. While the article does allude to several reasons against building a new center to make up for this lack of bookings, including an oft cited Brookings Institute study that advises cities against such development, it also repeats without follow up or context some misleading claims from those in favor of the convention center:

"At least a dozen groups considered Cleveland for meetings in 2005-09 but cited the center as their main reason for going elsewhere. The potential business represented nearly 44,000 hotel room nights and an economic impact of $36 million, according to the visitors bureau. "Many more groups never consider Cleveland because they don't like the center, Brewer said." "A PricewaterhouseCoopers report completed last year for the Convention Facilities Authority predicts that the number of conventions and trade shows could decline by 50 percent by 2008 if the city doesn't build a more competitive center."

OK, here are just a few questions that Sarah Hollander, the Plain Dealer reporter, might have asked, but (apparently) didn't: 1) How reliable is the visitors bureau's tracking of "reasons for rejecting the center?" Do they have a formal method of measuring this in place or is their account of the "at least a dozen groups" who opted out of hosting their conventions in Cleveland purely anecdotal? And if these groups cite the condition of the center as their main reason for not choosing Cleveland as their convention site, then what is it about the center that doesn't meet their needs? Is it simply a lack of electrical outlets? a lack of net access? etc.--i.e. are these "defects" ones that must be overcome with a new center or ones that might be dealt with rather cheaply, through renovation? 2) What exactly does the loss of $36 million in convention revenues over four years (2005-09) represent to the local economy? $9 million a year sounds like a reasonably large amount of money in terms of how the article puts it, but when one considers that the city's new red light cameras are bringing in a minimum of $230,000 per month (or at this rate roughly $2.76 million per year) directly into the the city coffers, it doesn't seem to be that much of a revenue loss, and certainly not enough, perhaps, to justify going to the tax payers to provide Forest City with another lucrative Cleveland project. 3) Who commissioned the PriceWaterhouseCoopers report? And how much of the drop off in convention business that it cites is the result of factors that have nothing to do with the quality of Cleveland's facilities, including big gains for other markets like Vegas and Orlando (which are taking away business from the likes of Great Lakes city Chicago) and a decline overall in businesses' desire to participate in such get-togethers? Had the reporter asked these questions (and hopefully she and other reporters will in the future), maybe our decision makers, like Mayor Frank Jackson, who supports a new center, would have the information they need to see that a new convention center will be yet another band-aid applied to the wrong area of our wounded economy.

Oh, Cleveland, My Cleveland From today's headlines, our city in one of several of its nutshells: Top U.S. broadband town: Cleveland Greater Cleveland 5th worst for fine-particle air pollution Which article do you suppose mentions the city's blue-collar "pedigree?" The one about broadband, of course.

But Will It Sell in Beachwood? Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly links to an article by Garance Franke-Ruta in the American Prospect, which details the recent efforts of a company called Environics to use demographic/consumer research to find a better way to sell progressive politics to America. One important finding of the research that the company conducted in 2005 seems to confirm a lot of the conventional wisdom as to why John Kerry lost the 2004 election: talk about values and "character" connect more with voters than does talk about what Democrats like to call "Kitchen Table Issues." As Franke-Ruta reports:

"The new data have convinced even the most skeptical that an approach that worked in the industrial age is not as suited to the new, globalized information-era economy, where isolated voters look first at character as they assess candidates. Last August, for example, the Democracy Corps political polling firm released a memo that sharply diverged from the firm’s usual reports on such generic Democratic concerns as jobs, prescription drug benefits, and heath insurance. In focus groups held among rural voters in Wisconsin and Arkansas, as well as disaffected Bush voters in Kentucky and Colorado, pollsters Karl Agne and Stanley Greenberg found that concerns about a stagnant economy, job security, health-care costs, and the war in Iraq were consistently trumped by questions of values. "[A]s powerful as the concern over [economic] issues is, the introduction of cultural themes -- specifically gay marriage, abortion, the importance of the traditional family unit, and the role of religion in public life -- quickly renders them almost irrelevant in terms of electoral politics at the national level," Agne and Greenberg wrote. "Particularly among non-college educated voters, cultural issues not only superseded other concerns, they served as a proxy for many voters on those other issues."

Note, of course, that focus here is not on what politicians do, but on what they talk about and how. The lesson here is one on display at shopping malls, and in things like the woeful U.S. personal savings rate, which is currently in negative territory: people don't actually understand economics in terms of dollars and cents, but rather in terms of consuming habits. Or in concrete terms: it's enough to say you own a BMW to convince a typical American you are a successful, and even (gasp) a moral person. The petty (well, not so petty) details of your owning the car (e.g. whether you had to borrow money for it, at what terms, whether the payments affect other quality of life issues for you, such as your ability to save for child's college education, etc.) just doesn't matter and real dollars and cents thinking just doesn't get done (or hardly gets done with any savvy) at the average Americans' kitchen table, and Democrats, who do this kind of thinking and talk about it in their speeches, simply don't connect with their audiences, who prefer talk about economics in clear terms, like BMWs in the driveway. The advice the researchers give is for Dems to stop cedeing the field to Republicans when it comes to talking about "values"--as in, well, Americans may not understand why the repeal of the estate tax causes budgetary troubles and ultimately will cost them in their own pocketbooks, but they will understand "Sid and Steve want a marriage license." While forcing the Demorcrats to "talk values" and cultivate "character" may be winning politics, it does have an awful underbelly: many of us want to vote Democratic precisely because the party is (well, more) grounded in reality, and because of our sense that politicians in the Democratic party don't buy bullshit, like "you are what you buy," or at least put bullshit thinking like this on the backburner, prefering think instead about things like Housing and Urban Development. Moreover, on almost all the "values issues" we are on the opposite side of Johnny of what Jenny and Johny McMansion believe, as sit they in traffic, locked in their SUV (to play up an unfortunate suburban stereotype). My own hope--which is a misbegotten one, given that the suburbs won't stop expanding and wielding greater political influence (as the Greater Cleveland areas history over the last 20 years itself attests)--is that the Democrats would be able to launch a culture war of their own: to get people to reject the me-first, fear-based value system that is becoming more and more prevalent throughout the nation, as this quote (also in the Franke-Ruta article) from Environics founder Michael Adams points out:

"While American politics becomes increasingly committed to a brand of conservatism that favors traditionalism, religiosity, and authority," Adams writes, "the culture at large [is] becoming ever more attached to hedonism, thrill-seeking, and a ruthless, Darwinist understanding of human competition."

I would argue, as Thomas Frank does in The Conquest of Cool and elsewhere, that this is the binge and purge of modern American Capitalism and one side feeds the other: get wild at the strip mall dance club and pray at the mall-like Mega-Church later, I suppose. And it seems to me, too, that there has to be a way to work against this culture, and one that's not so monolithic and intellectually foolish as efforts launched by the likes of Bill Bennet. Meanwhile, let the marketer's direct the Democrats: asking, "But will it sell in Beachwood?" about things like privacy and fairness and beware of the results you get.

It's the Wonderful, Self-Correcting Blogosphere, By George See below for the earlier post which mentioned Democrat Congressman Sherrod Brown's guest-blogging at the TPM Cafe, and perhaps too casually linked to a post and comments at Brewed Fresh Daily . I want to note here that I no way meant to suggest that George from BFD had "defamed" Brown for not appearing at Meet The Bloggers (see George's link to the definition of vilify in this post); rather I was referring to language like this, from the comments section at Brewed Fresh Daily:

"If a candidate [i.e. Brown] can’t handle a few bloggers, hedozen'tn’t deserve to run."

And from George himself:

"In my opinion, Sherrod has a temper. If he were to do MTB, and someone, like Russo, were to push him on his record, he’d lose his temper. His campaign is carefully trying to control that. Sherrod is trying to stand on his voting record and politrhetorictoric, not engaging in Q&A with voters. His campaign is focused on pandering opinion to likely fundraisers around the country, not on answering “base issues” that directly effect residents of Ohio. "So, no. I don’t think he’s got what it takes to spend an hour in the hotseat. And for people like HeightsMom who think this is being blown way out of proportion—I disagree. The way Sherrod is handling situations like this reveal his character. This isn’t about Tim Russo—it’s about how Sherrod Brown handles himself in any situation. He’s doing everything he can to control the outcome thru manipulation. Is that what we want in a Senator?" And: "Feh. I grow tired of people talking about Brown’s legislative accomplishments. He has none. Sure he fought on the side of righteousness - and lost every single battle. He sat out of the 2002 Gov race where he could have taken on Bob Taft, he sat out of the 2004 Senate race where he could have taken on Voinovich. Then he proposed to sit out this one until he saw someone else prepared to take on the mantle. It stinks of careerism and opportunity, and yes, ego. "That doesnt strike me as a guy who will truly lay it on the line for the people he purports to represent. "His campaign from the gitgo has been inept - to the point of firing two senior staff members before it has even started - and the only people who have engaged him are a few bloggers. How on earth is he going to handle himself when the real campaign begins and they spend millions of dollars against him?

I made a mistake to link to the post at BFD without directly referencing these quotes, and I compounded my mistake, I suppose, via my use of the word "vilify" itself. Not to go all "Dictionary on Dictionary" with George, whose site is a valuable "central station" for NEO Bloggers, but definition number 1. for vilify over at Merriam-Webster's online site seems to suit the language I've quoted above. It's worth pointing out that I can't find a single instance of Brown publicly criticizing NEO bloggers, as George's post today seems to contend. On his own blog, Brown even has a friendly post up about Russo, and when Brown's staffer called to cancel his Meet the Bloggers appearance, the staffer was exceedingly polite went out of his way to point out that Brown in fact wanted to meet other bloggers, just not Tim Russo. It seems to me that a lot of the anti-Brown talk is just misplaced loyalty for Russo, who, by all accounts, seems to deserve a good word. But I can't see why Russo's spat with Brown is reason for the rest of NEO's liberals to dismiss Brown as a candidate for Sentate. I'll close, with this point, which is echoed in comments section of the post that George put up in response to mine: Time and energy would be better spent taking on Mike Dewine. Or as Roldo writes at BFD:

Ohio Sen. DeWine must be as happy as can be reading bloggers on the crucial U. S. Senate race. Isn’t it time to check out the real enemy?

In Honor of MLK Read this post from Nathan Newman at the TPM Cafe, which points out, rightly so, that Dr. King also dreamt about a society in which labor is organized:

"In the dumbing down of celebrations of Martin Luther King Jr. as a national icon, the relatively radical demands for economic justice that he was making in his later years tend to disappear. . . . Most memory of Martin luther King Jr. emphasizes only individual equality but his legacy, including his death, was also dedicated to the collective organization and empowerment of workers. "

Meanwhile, Sherrod Brown, who's been vilified for skipping out on a Meet The Bloggers Q and A, seems to be doing quite well at the TPM Cafe himself. Here he is posting (so what if it is with a staffer's help?) on how labor and progressives' efforts at an economic justice agenda are all too often smeared with accusations of "class warfare":

"The fact is that the Republicans in the last decade have been committing class warfare themselves.

"Every day on the House floor, Republicans stand up for corporate give-aways and tax breaks for the rich while at the same time they cut programs for working families like student loans, food stamps, veterans benefits, home heating programs for the elderly, Medicaid and Medicare.

"All of this is making the rich richer while it squeezes the middle class and hurts the poor."

While I have no real opinion on the whole Brown/Russo cock-preening feud (which seems to be, well, pretty Russo-driven), and even less of an idea of who originally provoked whom, I do think that Brown deserves some support for his pro-labor stance, and I wonder if Hackett, who is our state's Wesley Clark (and that's a good thing) won't be more of a triangulator, thanks to his Cincinnati home base.

Finally, instead of writing posts for Cleveland Uber Alles, I have been busy trying to hold my own in the comments section of the Becker-Posner Blog. For those of you who don't know, Becker is the famous University of Chicago economist and Posner is the Honorable Richard Posner, a federal judge and law professor at University of Chicago. Trying to disagree with them is great fun. Right now, I'm delighted at how the conversation I've been adding to is filled with delarations about how unions are inherently less efficient that "at-will" employment arrangements; yet when I ask these presumably well studied economics folks to cite research that demonstrates this, they don't seem to be able to. Could it be that the assumption that an organized workforce is less efficient than an "open shop" is just that, an assumption? Feel free to post your academic or non-academic two cents worth here at Cleveland Uber Alles.

Light Posting Cleveland Uber Alles aims to be one of those long-on-words sites, but sometimes, well, if brevity isn't the soul of wit, then it's just plain necessary. So here, in two sentences a piece, are all three of the blog posts I've been wanting to put down over the last few days. First, Vanity Fair's James Wolcott takes a break from intelligently snarking his way through the endless NYC-media cocktail party to link to this must read dispatch about rust belt economics and the squeeze job that Pittsburgh's suburbs are running on the poor in city's core. Take heed, Clevelanders, before you even think of congratulating our city for not being Pittsburgh or Detroit. Second, every time I click over to Bill Callahan's Cleveland Diary, I pause to say a word of thanks for the simple fact that Mr. Callahan is here to read the papers for us. If I had the time, I'd love to pile on to Bill's good catch of the story about Cleveland lawyer and union-buster Peter Kirsanow receiving a Bush Administration "recess appointment" to the National Labor Relations Board, but instead I'll only note that this move is Rovian politics at its sharpest and bitter best, in line with appointing a timber industry representative to oversee the Healthy Forests Initiative--which is to say, appointing a union buster the the NLRB is simply in keeping with the overall Bush Administration policy of turning every government agency against itself, so we'll just want to get rid of the whole thing I guess and drown it in Grover Norquist's bathtub, and don't expect there to be a new friend for Cleveland workers in Washington any time soon. Was that two sentences? Finally, I want to hit two points from Christine from Really Bad Cleveland Accent's post on my own Cheap Airfare, The Engine of Culture : 1) Could it be that all those weekend flights to Cleveland you mention are booked by displaced Clevelanders like yourself, hoping for a cheap visit to the old folks back home and not, as it were, people looking to come to the heartland from the over-priced coasts?; 2) Thanks for this well-rendered paragraph about Madeline Bruml, whose Cleveland Brain Gain project sparked the post, for it does give Bruml credit she deserves (though I can't help but wonder if her interest in bringing suburban kids downtown isn't simply symptomatic of a zeitgeist that points to the whitening of the inner-city and the browning of the outer ring, rather than the more integrated, less economically polarized future I'd like to dream about):

The thing I want to point out to those who might consider Bruml a "childish" proponent of Cleveland's economic future is that she gets what's happening with suburban sprawl. It's evident from her Cool Cleveland interview that she gets that her friends - yes, probably from well-to-do suburban families - are dreaming their futures out in Solon or Avon Lake "starter castles", taking their Baby Gap-clad future children to Champps for some freedom fries, leaning slightly left in their voting habits but resolutely avoiding the city because it's crammed with scary poor people. But she sees that that shouldn't necessarily be the American Dream for her generation, and is cheerfully willing and able to kick them in a direction that this New Urbanist is pretty pleased about.

Low-Grade Update on Creation of an Interactive Map of the City Via a Google page dedicated to helping web developers install Google Maps on their sites, I attempted to import a map into the Cleveland Uber Alles blog template. No luck. Anyone out there have some recommendations for help and/or making the whole idea I discussed here happen?

Clicking and Driving Around Cleveland So, in keeping with the new message that "the public approves of Big Brother", Cleveland has gone live with its red light and speeding cameras. While I am anxiously awaiting reports that these cameras have been sabotaged by kids in the neighborhoods they've invaded, I say hats off to Ward 13's Joe Cimperman for opposing the cameras so staunchly and articulately. The link to this Crane's profile is courtesy of the (nose-holding gesture) conservative Right Angle Blog, which I've clicked my way to a number of times over the past months. Here you'll find some free-marketeer ditto-heading in the comments, but hardly a peep of pro-war wing-nuttery. I guess this is the one benefit of keeping it local. I would like to believe that this blog--and the whole Republican party really--is kept up by the sort of moderate, money-motivated Republican who reads (and understands) George Will's logically constructed (albeit overly pro-ownership class) arguments, and looks to some romanticized image of the WASPY elite for his image of "the city on the hill." But either there are fewer of these Republicans around these days, or, if they are around, they're not admitting that they're Republicans. Anyway, perhaps the link to the article about Cimperman is evidence of Right Angle's moderate position. Cimperman himself seems to have developed quite a mastery of Clintonian "centrism" and triangulation. Here here he is, in the Crane's article, moderating (yet holding) his stance on Wal-Mart:

"That’s an interesting debate and I’m happy you brought it up. When the whole issue came up a few months ago about Steelyard Commons, the debate really wasn’t about Wal-Mart. Do I have feelings about the company? Of course I do. Do I also realize that there are things about the company that its opponents don’t like to talk about? Yeah, there are two sides to every story. Where the issue became something that I felt very passionately about, is that the city of Cleveland for the last 10 years has been funding, aiding and subsidizing grocery stores, because we realize that grocery stores are a critical component of keeping people in their neighborhoods and in the city of Cleveland. My concern with the development wasn’t so much with the company itself, but when they add a grocery store to their unit, because when that happens you often see local grocers struggle. But this is a free-market society. This is capitalism and people make choices. I still think people will choose Dave’s and the West Side Market instead of going to a superstore for their grocery items. But I don’t think it’s wrong to have that kind of debate."

Savvy with Symbolism. . . Now what about city management? Props to our new mayor for choosing East Tech High School as the site for his inauguration.

No building in the entire city might better embody the non-glamorous and real struggle that is essential for the survival and success of our city. Here's hoping that the comparisons made here between Frank Jackson and G.W. Bush are dead wrong and this smart use of "backdrop" for a political message isn't just aping the sort of stage management that makes the Presidential Administration so odious. Here's hoping that Jackson can translate simple eloquent gestures like these into action for the city itself.

Though it was more ballyhooed for its proposal of dismissing the school board than anything else, Jackson's position paper on education suggests that he does have some good ideas for moving the city's school's forward. In this paper, Jackson is conciliatory regarding vouchers, proposing a tax break for parents who choose to send their children to private schools, but otherwise making it clear that the school system should not be "outsourced" to the private sector. This is good.

Not so good: Jackson also seems determined to pay lip service to all the largely conservative-driven talk about "Outcomes Based Education," which is really, for those of us who care about education, a way of saying that he's concerned about test scores and, like so many other educators, has bought into the lie of the Texas Miracle.

Hopefully, however, the fact that CPS graduate Jackson personalizes the struggle to improve the district will keep him from getting too caught up in all this talk about bench marks to get down to the really good ideas his plan offers, like getting the schools to save money by pooling their buying power with other districts in the region, getting parents back into the school buildings by offering them classes there, and expanding students' apprenticeship and work opportunities. Importantly, Jackson proposes partnering schools, like John Hay High, with institutions like the Cleveland Clinic and Case Western Reserve, creating regional magnet schools that draw in tuition revenues from the surrounding area by providing top notch instruction. This is an idea that is long over due, and one wonders if the only thing preventing it is the fact that CWRU doesn't have a very active department of Education. Regardless, Cleveland needs a high school like Bronx Science or the Chicago Lab School--in this regard working to be "like New York" or "like Chicago" would be truly beneficial for the city and its residents. It's now a truism that real growth in downtown can't be sustained in a meaningful way without fixing the schools, and though introducing elite schools into the system might risk creating a two tiered school district, it would have the practical effect of addressing residents concerns that their are literally no good school to send their children to.

The Business People We're Supposed to Subsidize This story shows us one of them. Note how the pay-to-play government that DiLiberto ran in Eastlake, OH, mirrors the one waiting to have its lid blown off in Washington DC. Note, too, that the "jobs" that were supposed to be created--the jobs that are always supposed to be created, no matter to whom the graft goes--failed to survive.