Tag: media

The wrong debate

This story in today’s Washington Post — which is pointedly and beautifully deconstructed by Ken Silverman — purports to even-handedly review the likely mode of attack that will be taken by Republicans in teh fall should Barack Obama hold on and win the nomination.

The question is whether Obama is too liberal or, at the very least, he can be painted as being too liberal. Silverman says we can expect more of this during the general election campaign, and I think he’s right.

But I also think the Democrats over the years have allowed the question to be framed for them, allowed the word liberal to be turned into an epithet.

The Post story points to “liberal” losers — Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, John Kerry — ignoring important elements of those campaigns. Mondale may have been a liberal — the only one of the three that fits the traditional definition, I would argue — but he also was running against one of history’s most popular presidents. To ignore this is to ignore history and to alter the meaning of the 1984 election.

The Dukakis loss came about because of a combination of factors: the shadow of the Reagan era, Dukakis’ inept campaign (remember the tank?), Willie Horton and, yes, his being painted as a liberal governor of a liberal state. Did he lose because he was liberal? I’ll let the reader decide.

As for John Kerry, he ran a disasterous campaign, frittering away any chance he had by not addressing the Swiftboat controversy and by attempting to out-Bush Bush on the war. And he still managed to get within a couple of percentage points.

I think Blue Texan, writing on Firedog Lake, offers an interesting take on this. Writing about Hillary Clinton’s use of the liberal slur, Blue Texan writes

When was the last time you heard a Republican accuse another of being “too conservative”? For that matter, when was the last time you heard a Democratic candidate use that as an attack on a Republican? Right, never. There’s a reason for that, and it’s not an accident. It’s the result of years and years of a disciplined and sustained branding effort by the GOP.

The thing that amazes me is that nearly every public opinion poll on the issues shows that voters support what are considered to be traditional liberal policies — on health care, on the economy, etc. And yet, we still have one side running away from its own base, allowing the other to frame the campaign’s talking points and establish the general rhetorical tone.

My advice: The Democrat should run as a Democrat and the Republican as a Republican. Let Obama — or Clinton — push universal healthcare, (an unfortunately limited) withdrawal from Iraq, a bailout for homeowners, public works and a rollback of the Bush tax cut; let McCain call for a thousand-years war, offer nothing on healthcare and push tax cuts as the sole solution to the economy.

Basically, stop running from the liberal label.

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The myth of media bias

Matthew Yglesias takes a look at the latest storyline to catch on during this year’s Democratic primary race and finds it to be based more on myth than fact. It is true that Hillary Clinton tends to get more focused coverage, but that has less to do with a built-in awe of Barack Obama than with Clinton’s familiarity.

Yglesias offers an interesting thought experiment designed to show that the bias argument is flawed:

I’d say it’s definitely true that, on balance, Obama has gotten better press than Clinton. Still, I think Clinton fans are going more than a little overboard with this monocausal account of the campaign. For one thing, one important exception to this is that if Obama had lost eleven contests in a row, there’s no way he’d still be treated as a viable candidate. Similarly, if Obama had reached a situation where nobody can mathematically see a way for Clinton to catch his lead without altering DNC rules, I seriously doubt the race would continue to be covered as a serious competition.

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More on McCain

Tristero on Hullabaloo hits on some of the same themes I touched on yesterday in regard to the John McCain story in Thursday’s New York Times. the issue is not about an alleged affair — one that the story only touches on unconvincincingly — but about judgment and the people with whom McCain has been willing to associate.

From Hullabaloo:

McCain admits his judgment is frequently awful. Even when he knows better, he can’t help himself sometimes- he’s easily, and dangerously, swayed by strong personalities and by his need for friendships with such people. But think about what that means. Even if you cut him slack on a personal level – something along the level of, “well, at least he has the courage to admit he’s wrong and the insight to know why” – this is not the kind of personality you want negotiating with Vladimir Putin, to pick just one example.

Sure. Everyone makes mistakes. And even though McCain makes spectacular mistakes, that in and of itself isn’t the real crux of the problem. Rather it’s this: By his own admission, McCain can’t learn from his mistakes. He knows himself that his personality is too rigid. That is the critical difference between John McCain and a truly qualified candidate for President of the United States. And no amount of straight-shooting hype will change that.

And Matthew Yglesias hits on another interesting point — remarking on an interesting Newsweek piece on a discrepancy between past McCain statements and his most recent comments in response to the Times story — about the press; relationship to the candidate:

At this point, it’s worth observing something about the general McCain-press dynamic. One thing reporters like about McCain is that he offers shoot-from-the-hip statements on topics that come up in discussions. Reporters like this for good reason — the carefully worded, artfully hedged statements in which the vast majority of politicians speak nowadays is really annoying. That said, politicians don’t talk like that because they’re all douchebags, they talk like that because that’s how you have to talk. If you make the slightest slip-up or misstatement, the press will pounce all over you.

Unless, that is, you’re John McCain. If you’re John McCain you can make an obviously false statement like claiming you’ve “never done favors for special interests or lobbyists” or saying that “no representative of Paxson or Alcalde & Fay personally asked Senator McCain to send a letter to the FCC” when you yourself said in the past that you’d been contacted by Paxson and the press just lets it slide. Why? Because they like him. But they like him because he’s spontaneous. But he’s spontaneous because they let him get away with this stuff. And they let him get away with it because they like him. It’s what makes him such a formidable political figure — he can run around doing things no other politicians could get away with and actually
attract praise for it.

Unless, of course, it all comes crashing down. If reporters start judging McCain by their usual rules, then he’ll have to turn himself into just another carefully-hedging pol. But one who’s a million years old, one who thinks the problem with the Bush foreign policy is that we haven’t started enough wars, and one who doesn’t even care about the economic challenges facing the country.

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McCain, the Times and the issue of ethics

The response to the John McCain story in today’s New York Times on the right has been one of shock, of high moral outrage that unnamed sources would be used to sully the reputation of a war hero, to insinuate that he’d had an affair.

Forget for a minute the whispering campaigns regularly waged by what Hillary Clinton has rightly called the “vast right-wing conspiracy,” innuendo that not only has targeted the Clintons, John Kerry, Al Gore and most of the Democratic Party, but John McCain himself.

Forget the expected attack on the Times as a bastion of liberal bias.

What is important about the response is its focus on the sex scandal angle and the way in which it sidetracks the real debate. The Times, in focusing on what unnamed sources say was more than a friendly relationship with a female lobbyist, has taken the focus off the real issues in the story — a somewhat muddled presentation that rehashes a lot of what we already knew about McCain.

The basic question the Times story raises is legitimate and must be addressed: Has John McCain, who has staked his reputation on being a clean-government reformer, engaged in the kind of influence peddling he has regularly decried?

The story offers an interesting and believable narrative in this regard, but leaves this issue up in the air, with questions raised about the nonprofit he had formed and his connections to a variety of lobbyists with business before his Senate committee.

These are issues that need to be explored. McCain attempted to answer them during his press conference today — defending his honor and credibility, but also taking a cheap shot at the Times designed to play to the GOP base.

Should his responses be taken at face value? No more than the comments from unnamed sources in the Times story.

My opinion on unnamed sources remains the same: that they should only be used sparingly in special circumstances to get information of vital importance that can be gotten in no other way or to protect the safety or privacy of sources — a whistleblower, for instance, or someone getting help from the local food pantry. I’m not sure that the use of unnamed sources here rises to this standard, though I will say they were not used frivilously.

So, what should we take from this? There remain a lot of questions that need to be asked about a candidate who has made honor, integrity and straight talk his calling cards, but has shown a disturbing willingness to pander, pander and pander again.

Let’s hope the media continues to probe deeply into McCain’s background, to press him on his flip-flops and conflicts, real or apparent, and that the eventual Democratic nominee also is held to this standard.

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