History is Happening Now

On Friday nights I download a podcast of PBS’s “Washington Week,” a weekly television news program featuring a roundtable of journalists who discuss politics and public affairs, moderated by Gwen Ifil. Lately, I’ve also been downloading the program’s “Webcast Extra,” in which the panel takes questions submitted by email or from members of the audience (when there is an audience).

This week, the podcast – which was a recording of a show filmed in Denver in anticipation of the Democratic National Convention – included a fascinating exchange between a member of the audience and one of the panelists, James Barnes, who writes for the National Journal:

 QUESTIONER: John McCain made a statement after Russia invaded Georgia that “nations don’t invade other nations in the 21st century,” apparently not acknowledging our invasion of Iraq. Other than in the blogosphere, the press paid little attention to this statement that I saw. And is this because the press is timid and afraid of being called unpatriotic, or did it not, in your mind, deserve more critical comment from the general press?

IFIL: (to the panel) General thoughts?

BARNES: Well I think, um, I guess I would argue for the purposes of this election it’s pretty clear which candidates, how they stand on the war on Iraq, and I think that’s very clear. I mean, if you want to call out McCain for being hypocritical, I suppose you can, but I would, I’m not so sure, um, I mean, if we jump on everything, when we jump on everything, we are already, then we are part of a process that just magnifies these gaffes and sort of sends the election on this constant, ever-changing, 24-, 48-, 72-hour news cycle, which quite frankly, personally, I do not believe, uh, serves people well. There are other journalists who do, and they are all over the blogosphere. And so they are out there. But I think that we shouldn’t make big deals out of what I would argue just isn’t really a significant, I don’t really think it’s that significant an issue.

I thought this was a fascinating exchange. I find myself wanting to refer to Glenn Greenwald’s piece, which might surprise people given earlier comments I have posted. (Like Walt Whitman, I contradict myself.)

On ABC’s This Week, Mark Halperin of Time Magazine reportedly said the following about McCain’s inability to remember the number of houses he owns:

My hunch is this is going to end up being one of the worst moments in the entire campaign for one of the candidates but it’s Barack Obama. […] I believe that this opened the door to not just Tony Rezko in that ad, but to bring up Reverend Wright, to bring up his relationship with Bill Ayers.

This claim was rightly attacked by George Stephanopoulos for its utter absurdity and obvious illogic.  But I present the quote to you here as another example of the inherent asymmetry in how our media covers the American Left and the Right–or, as we should more accurately label them, the Center and the Right.

Democratic Centrists, the only sort of Democrats who are ever allowed to run for national office now, are never given any sort of traction for the–very rare–character-based attacks they level against their opponents on the Far Right, who are always uniformly the sort of candidates Republicans run for national office. 

No, when hypercentrist John Kerry wasn’t being characterized as a far Radical Leftist–an absurd claim, as any genuine Leftist will tell you–he was being castigated in the favorite terms of Republican “class warfare”:  as an elitist, out of touch, Frenchified, gigolo (because his wife is wealthy) with an “arrogance” problem. 

Four years later, McCain is a salt of the earth maverick POW superhero (like Batman, of course) who knows how to be a good bipartisan compromiser, despite the fact that he is a womanizing hyper-neoconservative who cheated on his wife and married his wealthy mistress and proudly fought in the morally odious and unnecessarily destructive Vietnam War, a war even his own party was forced to oppose when Nixon ran for office (forgetting Nixon’s escalation of the war when actually in office).

For news cycle after news cycle, we have been treated to sage analysts explaining the huge “inexperience” and “national security” and “arrogance” problems Obama will have to overcome if he wants to win over skeptical working class voters.  We are almost never informed that the American people overwhelmingly support Democratic policies.  When mainstream analysts don’t directly deploy these character smears against Obama, they are constantly discussing such smears in purely “analytic” terms and will justify such discussions by saying some hypothetical set of American people holds these views, regardless of what the national polling numbers actually are, and without even a second’s thought to the possibility that discussing these “problems” is precisely what brings them into public consciousness in the first place.

All of this would be bad enough, and enough of a sign that our democracy is horrifically broken, but when a clearly symmetrical “character issue” emerges on the Right, these same upstanding standard-bearers of journalistic integrity immediately and reflexively flip the story into a liability for the Democratic Centrist candidate.  When McCain reveals himself to be a “gigolo,” in exactly the same manner as John Kerry, Obama better watch out, because he dared to squeak in opposition to the Bipartisan Maverick War Superhero POW. 

Be prepared for more of this:  When Joe Biden makes a gaffe, he will be accused of “Destroying Obama’s Campaign” and “Showing How Poor Obama’s Judgment Is.”  When President Bush or Senator McCain make gaffes–and they have made a huge number of documented gaffes, every day–these slips will go unreported or will be glossed over in the mainstream press.