Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

The candidates, the press and overreactions


(image from MSNBC)

The conservative wing of the blogosphere has been buzzing about the decision on the part of the Obama campaign to cut off a Florida television station from access to the candidates and their wives. It is a foolish move on the campaign’s part, of course, but the conservative response certainly goes beyond the rational.

A typical comment comes from Greg Pollowitz at National Review Online, who called the campaign’s decision

A preview of things to come in Obamerica — play ball or you’re out.

This echoes a letter I received over the weekend (it’ll run in Thursday’s paper):

An now Joe Biden receives some questions he is uncomfortable with, and the Obama campaign pulls all further interview from the station — WFTV in Florida? Is this an example of things to come and what we should expect from an Obama presidency — that we shall not dare question anything our president or vice president do? Is this a democracy or a dictatorship?

Again, the Obama folks were wrong to cancel Jill Biden’s appearance, but for conservatives and Republicans who have been chattering about liberal bias — and who applauded decisions by the McCain campaign to shield Sarah Palin from the press and who canceled an interview on Larry King’s show because of touch questioning of a McCain advisor by CNN’s Campbell Brown:

This afternoon, anchorman Wolf Blitzer announced on air that McCain’s planned interview with Larry King tonight had been canceled by the campaign. Blitzer said McCain aides complained that Brown had gone “over the line” in her grilling of Bounds.

McCain campaign spokeswoman Maria Comella later explained the cancellation with this sharply worded statement:

“After a relentless refusal by certain on-air reporters to come to terms with John McCain’s selection of Alaska’s sitting governor as our party’s nominee for vice president, we decided John McCain’s time would be better served elsewhere.”

The thing I find so striking about this is that the rhetoric being used by the McCain campaign — the faux outrage, etc. — is no different than that offered by my liberal colleagues. That the GOP has ginned it up this time is no surprise, nor is it a shock that they were silent when McCain shut CNN down. the same can be said about Obama and the left.

In any case, there is another angle on this that goes beyond the Biden interview and raises questions about WFTV anchor Barbara West. Watch the video of the WFTV-Biden exchange, an interview framed around McCain talking points.


Now, watch her interview with McCain from about a week earlier, which was done by the same WFTV anchor and followed the same basic script.

I wouldn’t characterise it so much as a softball interview as I would pitching him batting practice — or free television ad time on a news show.

The lesson in all of this, I think, is that we need to see these little campaign outrages for what they are — nonsense that will be forgotten once the campaign is over.

I just don’t see either of these candidates as being the reincarnation of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush when it comes to the press. Both have a history of being open and available and both are likely to revert to past history once the election passes.

Or, at least, I hope that’s the case.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

On the right

Should John McCain lose — as it appears he will — it will be for a long list of reasons. But one of the biggest is the implosion of the right-wing coalition that allowed economic conservatives, social conservatives, neo-cons and the intelligensia to co-exist. This is the point that E.J. Dionne Jr. makes in today’s column.

McCain’s campaign is both the logical conclusion to this implosion and the conservative movement’s final death knell, uncovering an emptiness at its core created by an unbridgable gulf between its two major camps.

For years, many of the elite conservatives were happy to harvest the votes of devout Christians and gun owners by waging a phony class war against “liberal elitists” and “leftist intellectuals.” Suddenly, the conservative writers are discovering that the very anti-intellectualism their side courted and encouraged has begun to consume their movement.

The cause of Edmund Burke, Leo Strauss, Robert Nisbet and William F. Buckley Jr. is now in the hands of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity — and Sarah Palin. Reason has been overwhelmed by propaganda, ideas by slogans, learned manifestoes by direct-mail hit pieces.

In the end, Dionne writes,

There is no unified “right” or “center-right,” which is why we are no longer a conservative country, if we ever were.

Conservatism has finally crashed on problems for which its doctrines offered no solutions (the economic crisis foremost among them, thus Bush’s apostasy) and on its refusal to acknowledge that the “real America” is more diverse, pragmatic and culturally moderate than the place described in Palin’s speeches or imagined by the right-wing talk show hosts.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.