ThinkFast: Five Questions for E.J. Dionne

Today we’re launching a new short interview series on ThinkProgress. It’s called ThinkFast. Our inaugural edition features Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne.

On whether New York Times editor Bill Keller is right when he says that blogs only “recycle and chew on the news”:

Some bloggers break news. Some bloggers push the “mainstream media,” so-called, into paying attention to issues they might not have paid attention to. Some bloggers are indeed utterly parasitic on the mainstream media. [But] I don’t think there’s any substitute for good, old-fashioned reporting of that kind. It doesn’t make you anti-blog to say that.

On whether Samuel Alito is a closet moderate:

The place where a circuit court judge really shows what their beliefs and priorities are, are in dissents. Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissents were not nearly as liberal as Alito’s dissents were conservative. I think this whole notion that Alito is really a closet moderate is just not true. And at least some conservatives, such as Bruce Fein, who’s a real staunch conservative, says, “No, that’s nonsense, he’s one of us,” meaning a staunch conservative.

On the White House response to Congressman Murtha’s redeployment plan:

You saw the President himself seeming to realize that going after John Murtha, for example, was just not a good idea. And I think a lot of people were very offended. People are perfectly free to disagree with John Murtha, but to say as the White House spokesman said that he is like Michael Moore… Well if he’s Michael Moore, then I’m Johnny Damon.

Dionne moderated yesterday’s American Progress event, “The Ownership Society: Why No One is Buying, and a New Progressive Alternative.” For more on the event, including video, click here.

Full interview below:

QUESTION #1) Is New York Times editor Bill Keller right when he says that blogs only “recycle and chew on the news”?

DIONNE: Some bloggers break news. Some bloggers push the mainstream media, so-called, into paying attention to issues they might not have paid attention to. Some bloggers are indeed utterly parasitic on the mainstream media. Some bloggers are more responsible with facts than other bloggers are. I am a consumer of blogs. I enjoy them, I learn things from them. I learn things from blogs I disagree with. I even recently replied on Powerline, the conservative blog, to something they wrote, and I began by thanking them for calling my column to the attention of so many readers who read Powerline. So on the whole, they’re a good thing.

What I worry about most is that somehow there has to be a mechanism in the news commentary marketplace that supports original reporting. And while some bloggers actually do some real reporting, they don’t send foreign correspondents to Iraq or Europe or Afghanistan. And I don’t think there’s any substitute for good, old-fashioned reporting of that kind. It doesn’t make you anti-blog to say that. But I think that you can’t simply lose that. I worry that the economics of the newspaper industry are getting more and more complicated. I worry about losing the ability to finance essentially a relatively non-partisan sets of eyes and ear out in the world to provide the core information all of us need.

QUESTION #2) What’s your policy on using anonymous sources? Do you think they’re being overused?

DIONNE: I think there’s always been a kind of overuse of anonymous sources. The worst use, I have always thought – and probably somebody will find some time when I broke my own rule; that’s the thing about the blogosphere, they always call your bluff – but, you know, the worst way to use it is for anonymous pejorative comments, and that’s a terrible thing.

I think the challenge in the last year has been that, historically, journalists defended the use of anonymous sources because they were usually whistleblowers going after people above them in a hierarchy, and the whole idea of the journalistic shield was to protect those people in the middle or at the bottom of a hierarchy who are trying to bring wrongdoing to the attention of the public. And what you had in this last case was this kind of weird inversion, where you appeared to have people in the administration trying to raise doubts about or attack a person who was their political enemy – these are people at the top of the administration.

It’s hard to make any legal distinction here, but I think there is a distinction to be made, and I worry about losing anonymous sources because you don’t want to lose whistleblowers, who really can only report to the broader public – because the press, in many of these cases, is only a conduit to the broader public. I don’t want to lose those folks.

The second worst use, besides the anonymous pejorative, is trying to create the appearance of being insider by using the anonymous source when, in fact, an on the record source would probably say exactly the same thing, and I think there’s a temptation to use the anonymous source in that case. But in terms of revealing wrongdoing to the public, you will never get away from the importance of having a certain number of anonymous sources.

QUESTION #3) Is it “dishonest and reprehensible” to argue that the Bush administration misled us into war is, as Vice President Cheney says?

DIONNE: I think there’s no question that the Administration, whether directly or indirectly, tried to persuade Americans that there was some kind of link between Saddam and 9/11. And whether they said that directly or indirectly, that was put out there. When Secretary of State Rice and the National Security Advisor said we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud, she implied something that went well beyond what turned out to be the facts.

All the talk about aluminum tubes, all the talk about the meeting in Prague – these are all very disconcerting things and so whether you want to use the language ‘did they mislead Americans into war’ or the language that I’ve used which is ‘were they willing to say pretty much what it took to persuade Americans to go to war,’ I think these are all legitimate questions.

And I think, from its own point of view, the administration has made a mistake in simply going on the offensive against these questions rather than saying Americans have not turned on the war or developed doubts about the war just because of these questions. They are actually worried about where Iraq is going. And I think the administration, for its own sake and for the sake of the country, needs to say, ‘alright we know there are problems here; here is how we are going to move forward.’

And I think instead, they went to this sort of political campaign. And you saw the President himself seeming to realize that going after John Murtha, for example, was just not a good idea. And I think a lot of people were very offended. People are perfectly free to disagree with John Murtha, but to say as the White House spokesman said, that he is like Michael Moore. Well if he’s Michael Moore, then I’m Johnny Damon. I mean it’s a crazy comparison. I wish I were Johnny Damon sometimes.

What I think is even more important than the argument whether someone lied or not is whether the administration itself was misled by its own view of the war — that they in fact did really believe it would be easier than it would turn out to be, that we would be greeted as liberators, that we didn’t need more troops, and that the commitment might not have to last a long time. In the long run, it may be both the more significant criticism and the most troublesome thing because a series of excessively optimistic assumptions made it much harder to pull off what they proposed to pull off.

I always tell my neocon friends who strongly supported the war that in some ways they should be more critical of the administration than I am because this, what I think now can now be fairly said to be, excessive optimism turned out to be a mistake from anyone’s point of view.

QUESTION #4): What is the strongest case so far against Samuel Alito?

DIONNE: The strongest factual case was put together by Cass Sunstein, at the University of Chicago. Great law professor. He basically argued, as many conservatives I know have been willing to acknowledge, that the place where a circuit court judge really shows what their beliefs and priorities are, are in dissents. Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissents were not nearly as liberal as Alito’s dissents were conservative. I think this whole notion that Alito is really a closet moderate is just not true. And at least some conservatives, such as Bruce Fein, who’s a real staunch conservative, says, “No, that’s nonsense, he’s one of us,” meaning a staunch conservative.

I’m really concerned about the use of the courts to knock down progressive legislation. In other words, it seems to be part of the problem of this argument, the public argument tends to focus on liberal judicial activism, whereas right now, I think the real threat comes from conservative judicial activism. Whether it’s talking about knocking down aspects of the disability law, or knocking down environmental laws, or knocking down labor laws – kind of moving back to where the courts were before the New Deal. To me, if I had a chance to sit down on that committee and ask questions, I would want to focus an awful lot of questions in those areas, because I think that’s the direction many conservatives want to take the courts.

I identify very much with the argument that Justice Breyer makes in his new book, Active Liberty. I think that is a broad interpretive framework that is true to the constitution and true to the progressive tradition of the last 70 years. It doesn’t always mean the courts intervene on the liberal side. It does constrain the courts in certain ways. But I think it’s a shame that Justice Breyer hasn’t had a shot yet to become chief justice, because I think it would be interesting to see where he might take those ideas.

QUESTION #5) The event today addressed President Bush’s rhetoric of the “ownership society” to describe his domestic policy. Should liberals co-opt this rhetoric to describe their own policies, or should they be more focused on debunking it?

DIONNE: I think that liberals should do what they’ve always done when they’re successful, which is to say they are the party that’s expanded ownership. That nothing has expanded ownership more than the GI bill, the student loans that gave people the opportunity to get higher paying jobs. So no one’s against ownership. The question is how do you spread it around?

Seems to me the core difference is that liberals should argue that they are for the people who are trying to get up as opposed to the people who are already up. And so, it’s a question of how do you expand these opportunities, not that you’re against them.