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.
Not to distract from your analysis of media bias but, as I understand what Mark Halperin is saying in the video clip is that, somehow Obama calling out McCain on his confusion about the number of houses he owns, is like the crack in the dam that will unleash the great flood of attacks that McCain has (‘nobly’?) been withholding.
Halperin says, “it would be hard for McCain given the way he says he’s going to run this campaign to do all this stuff without the door being opened… the style now, the tone of it is you can do anything you want…”
I’m not clear whether Halperin thinks these attacks would be legitimate – certainly he’s trying to maintain the appearance of objectivity. I think it’s unrealistic to say that McCain has nobly held his tongue up to this point. And by suggesting that Obama has somehow opened himself up to attack, is this necessarily indicative of the same media bias that you outline in this and previous posts? Is Halperin suggesting, or maybe just assuming, that Obama actually does have a giant target on his back that everyone has been too polite to point it out?
I hope I’m clear that I certainly don’t think that the attacks that Halperin enumerates (Rezko, Wright, etc.) are at all worthwhile. But, by simply commenting on them, am I a part of the pundit/blogosphere class responsible for their perpetuation?
I just got caught up on weekend posts and am a bit dizzy and overwhelmed at trying to parse all the different perspectives, on all the different topics, and trying to find one of my own that is sufficient to engage with. :-$
Comment by aaron — August 25, 2008 @ 4:52 pm
I think Aaron asks an importabt question about whether we feed the attacks on Obama regarding Rezko and Wright when we raise them.
First of all, Halperin’s point is painfully stupid as a matter of political analysis — which naturally invites suspicion that Halperin has an agenda. (It’s hard to believe Halperin is stupid enough to think it hurts Obama that McCain doesn’t know how many houses he owns. Halperin’s point seems to be that ANY attack on McCain by Obama will suddenly inspire a round of withering attacks against Obama.)
One thing that makes Halperin’s point so stupid is his apparent belief that McCain has yet to really go after Obama regarding Rezko or Wright. This is preposterous: the Wright scandal emerged in the spring of this year, at a time when everyone in America who pays attention to politics was watching video clips of Wright’s sermons and endless discussion of them on cable news. And the Rezko scandal has also been a topic of discussion in the mainstream media for months — more than a year if you count the very first mentions of this “scandal”.
So the question is, why is Obama doing so well in the polls even after these negative stories have received so much media attention? And the answer is that the American people don’t care about them, and that’s why McCain isn’t putting more energy into driving these stories.
So I don’t think it’s harmful for us to talk about these stories in an honest way as we discuss how dishonest McCain is being or how moronic a news analyst is being. These stories don’t have any power left to hurt Obama, in my opinion. But I could be wrong.
As for media bias: We should compile a list of all the remarkably stupid things McCain has said in this campaign. Here are three examples that didn’t receive nearly enough media attention.
1. McCain’s claim that Russia’s invasion of Georgia was probably the first significant international crisis since the end of the Cold War. (Anyone recall September 11th, war in Agfhanistan, war in Iraq? Anyone?)
2. McCain suggesting that Iran was training members of Al Qaida and sending them into Iraq to kill Americans. (McCain levelled this explosive charge in public twice. How could he get something so important so wrong?)
3. McCain said the Sunni Awakening occured as a result of the so-called “surge” of military forces in Iraq, even though the Sunni Awakening occured before the surge.
All three of these “gaffes” should have raised big important questions about whether John McCain — now 6 years past retirement age — has any idea what’s going on in the world. But it appears McCain can say just about anything and get away with it because he was a POW. When did the presidency stop being an important job and start being a reward for coolness? (2000?)
Comment by Ian — August 25, 2008 @ 6:27 pm