I think these couple of paragraphs by EJ Dionne Jr. in today’s column sum up the media dynamic that has taken hold during the first few months of the Obama administration:
A media environment that tilts to the right is obscuring what President Obama stands for and closing off political options that should be part of the public discussion.
Yes, you read that correctly: If you doubt that there is a conservative inclination in the media, consider which arguments you hear regularly and which you don’t. When Rush Limbaugh sneezes or Newt Gingrich tweets, their views ricochet from the Internet to cable television and into the traditional media. It is remarkable how successful they are in setting what passes for the news agenda.
The power of the Limbaugh-Gingrich axis means that Obama is regularly cast as somewhere on the far left end of a truncated political spectrum. He’s the guy who nominates a “racist” to the Supreme Court (though Gingrich retreated from the word yesterday), wants to weaken America’s defenses against terrorism and is proposing a massive government takeover of the private economy. Steve Forbes, writing for his magazine, recently went so far as to compare Obama’s economic policies to those of Juan Peron’s Argentina.
Basically, he says, the media has bought into this — most likely because the cable news cycle relies on conflict and, given the weakness of the Republican Party, Limbaugh, Gingrich and Sean Hannity offer a level of conflict that makes for good TV. The “media,” he says,
play an independent role by regularly treating far-right views as mainstream positions and by largely ignoring critiques of Obama that come from elected officials on the left.
This was brought home at this week’s annual conference of the Campaign for America’s Future, a progressive group that supports Obama but worries about how close his economic advisers are to Wall Street, how long our troops will have to stay in Afghanistan and how much he will be willing to compromise to secure health-care reform.
In other words, they see Obama not as the parody created by the far right but as he actually is: a politician with progressive values but moderate instincts who has hewed to the middle of the road in dealing with the economic crisis, health care, Guantanamo and the war in Afghanistan.
While the right wing’s rants get wall-to-wall airtime, you almost never hear from the sort of progressive members of Congress who were on an America’s Future panel on Tuesday. Reps. Jared Polis of Colorado, Donna Edwards of Maryland and Raul Grijalva of Arizona all said warm things about the president — they are Democrats, after all — but also took issue with some of his policies.
The effect is to drag the debate to the right, foreclosing the ability of progressives to put their agenda on the table. Take the health care debate: The most progressive option, a Canadian-style single-payer health-care system, has been taken off the table meaning that the left starts from a position of weakness at the bargaining table. Dionne writes:
Edwards noted that if the public plan, already a compromise from single-payer, is defined as the left’s position in the health-care debate, the entire discussion gets skewed to the right. This makes it far more likely that any public option included in a final bill will be a pale version of the original idea.
That’s assuming it survives at all, given that some Blue Dogs have said they oppose it.
Dionne says that Edwards’ “point has broader application.”
For all the talk of a media love affair with Obama, there is a deep and largely unconscious conservative bias in the media’s discussion of policy. The range of acceptable opinion runs from the moderate left to the far right and cuts off more vigorous progressive perspectives.
Washington — both in terms of its political and media cultures — has yet to awake from its nightmare of three decades of conservative bias, regardless of what the polls say about the issues. Powerful committee chairs like Max Baucus are still buying into the conventional wisdom, which narrows debate.
And too many on the left have stood by without complaint. To understand what has happened to the left, one only needs to look at the way MoveOn.org has turned sycophant to the Obama administration, going so far as to bury discussion of Afghanistan. (To be fair, MoveOn crawled into bed with the Democrats several years ago, allowing itself to become a thinly veiled adjunct of the party — a very sad development. Although, to be fair, the organization just sent around a petition on health care calling for a public option that could compete with private plans, lending its resources to the fight for reform — although, again, it has allowed itself to define the left-most regions of debate as compromise.)
It is time the left got up off its heels and made it clear that its critiques of the Obama administration warrant serious coverage and need to be a part of the larger debate. The spectrum of opinion in this country — opinion that is within the mainstream — should not be far-right to center-left; let the far-right speak, but make sure the left is well represented.
The stakes on this are too high, as Chris Bowers points out on Open Left in discussing the health care fight and what it portends for Obama’s presidency:
Real health care reform–aka, a public option–is the lowest bar for progressives to clear with the current congress. It has the most lobbying behind it, bringing in not only health care reform groups, but also unions and mutli-issue groups like MoveOn. It only requires 50 votes in the senate, whereas Republicans will force 60-votes on virtually everything else. It is a very popular, not only in absolute terms (60%+), but also relatively popular compared to other major Democratic agenda items like climate change. And President Obama won’t have a 60%+ approval rating forever, either.
The bottom line is this: if we can’t get our most popular major agenda item, during the peak in Democratic popularity, when we need only 50 Senate votes, and on the issue where we have given our strongest lobbying and activist efforts, then we aren’t going to pass meaningful progressive legislation on anything else.
We are at 35 votes in the Senate on a non-trigger public option. Unions and MoveOn
are working on acquiring more. Instead of floating a “trigger” compromise, the White House needs to start getting on planes, and holding rallies in the states with Democratic Senators who are currently not on board with the public option. (Such a tactic, if effective, would also provide a template for future progressive victories in the Obama admintration.) We can do this–but we can’t do it if the White House is willing to fold without even publicly pressuring the retrograde Democrats.
If we don’t pass a non-trigger public option, it won’t just mean the end of meaningful health care reform. It will mean the end of any meaningful progressive legislation for at least two more years, and possible eight. Given the low bar, high popularity, and peak efforts we have on this one, a defeat on health care means that Republicans and Senate conservodems will be able to water down, or kill, all other progressive legislation proposed to this Congress.
Hank Kalet 