In an otherwise interesting piece on the economic approaches being taken by Democratic candidates, David Leonhardt in The New York Times offers this example of how the national press acts as a limiting force in national politics:
Given the odds that the next five weeks will turn one of the two candidates into a presumptive presidential nominee, it’s worth thinking about these ideas while there is still a campaign going on.
He’s talking about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, of course, ignoring that John Edwards has been running neck and neck in Iowa. True, Clinton and Obama have the money and the national support, but the votes have yet to be cast and Edwards has run a spirited campaign.
This reminds me of something Glenn Greenwald wrote a few weeks back, which I blogged on at the time. He was writing about the war, but his analysis could easily apply to the economy or to the mainstream wisdom on the primaries:
Anyone who disrupts Beltway harmony in order to hold the Bush administration accountable — anyone who seems actually bothered by the rampant lawbreaking — is thus easily dismissed as an annoying radical or a self-promoting fraud.
Basically, Beltway coverage is a self-fulfilling prophesy. If you marginalize Edwards — or Dodd or Richardson or Kucinich (who was missing from the Times’ chart on the candidates’ positions over the weekend — the full chart is available online) — you limit their ability to get their messages out, pushing them to the margins, which then justifies the press’ marginalization of them in the first place.
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