“A Media Staple Under Bush”: Where Are The ‘Comeback’ Columns About Obama?
For a “lame duck” politician who’s supposed to be licking his wounds after the Democratic Party’s steep midterm losses, President Obama these days probably doesn’t mind scanning the headlines each morning. Instead of confirming the slow-motion demise so many in the pundit class had mapped out for him, the headlines paint a picture of a president, and a country, in many ways on the rebound:
–U.S. Economic Confidence Index at 17-Month High
–America is Free of Ebola Cases
–G.O.P.-Led Benghazi Panel Bolsters Administration
–What The Huge Drop In Gasoline Prices Means For America
– Dow Hits Another Record Close
That’s probably more good news for Obama in one month than he had in the previous three combined.
And that selection of headlines doesn’t cover news of the most recent smooth and efficient enrollment period for the Affordable Care Act, the announcement of Obama’s executive action to deal with the languishing issue of immigration, his high-profile endorsement of net neutrality, or the United States’ landmark agreement with China to confront climate change.
As for Obama’s approval rating, it has remained steady in recent months, just as it has for virtually all of 2014. But aren’t lame ducks supposed to tumble after tough midterm defeats, the way President George W. Bush did right after the 2006 votes?
Meanwhile, the assumption that Republicans had boxed Obama in politically via their midterm momentum and would be able to bully him around (impeachment! a government shutdown!) hasn’t yet come to fruition. To date, their main response to the immigration executive order that Obama issued has been for Republicans to cast a symbolic vote of disapproval (i.e., Obama called their bluff).
Already the bloom seems to be coming off the GOP’s win. “According to the survey, 50 percent of Americans believe the GOP taking control of the House and the Senate next year will be bad for America,” CNN reported this week.
None of this is to say that Obama’s surging or that paramount hurdles don’t remain on the horizon. But some recent developments do undercut a widely held consensus in the Beltway press that Obama’s presidency effectively ended with the midterms and that his tenure might be viewed as a failed one.
Right after the election, a November Economist editorial announced, “Mr. Obama cannot escape the humiliating verdict on his presidency.” Glimmers of hope after the midterms were no reason to think Obama had “somehow crawled out of the dark place that voters put him,” the Washington Post assured readers. (Post columnist Dana Milbank has recently tagged Obama as a hapless “bystander” who’s “turning into George W. Bush.”) And a McClatchy Newspapers headline declared, “President Obama Is Now Truly A Lame Duck.”
But as the facts on the ground now change, many in the press seem reluctant to drop its preferred script and adjust to the headlines that suggest Obama’s second term is not shaping up to be the wreck so many pundits hinted it would be.
It’s worth noting that during Bush’s failed second term, which ended with his approval rating hovering around 20 percent, the same Beltway press did the opposite. Back then the press appeared overly anxious to proclaim a Bush comeback underway. Unlike Obama who’s actually rebounding, the D.C. press often touted Bush’s comeback, even though one never materialized.
At the time of the 2006 midterm elections, NBC’s Chuck Todd predicted that “if Democrats get control of Congress, President Bush’s approval rating will be over 50 percent by the Fourth of July next year.” Democrats did win the House and the Senate in 2006, but Todd’s predication was off — by 20 points. Bush was floundering with a 30 percent approval rating on Independence Day, 2007.
Todd was hardly alone. Earlier in 2005, Time got a quick jump on the Bush-is-back competition, announcing that the president had “found his voice” and that relieved White House aides “were smiling again” after a turbulent 2005. That year, according to the Gallup numbers, Bush’s approval rating remained submerged, falling as low as 31 percent. When it briefly climbed to 40 percent, the Baltimore Sun quickly asked, “Is Bush The New Comeback Kid?”
Even when Bush’s approval rating trended down again after the Republicans’ 2006 midterm wipeout, pundits were back on the hunt for the elusive comeback. In early 2007, Washington Post columnist David Broder, the dean of the Beltway press corps, typed up the White House spin and claimed, “It may seem perverse to suggest that, at the very moment the House of Representatives is repudiating his policy in Iraq, President Bush is poised for a political comeback. But don’t be astonished if that is the case.” Broder was sure, “Bush now shows signs of renewed energy and is regaining the initiative on several fronts.” Thirteen months later, Broder finally conceded the Bush comeback hadn’t materialized. (In fact, the opposite had unfolded.)
The media’s “comeback” double standard seems to reflect the misguided Beltway consensus that America’s a center-right country, so of course it was only a matter of time before Bush regained his footing (he didn’t) and that Obama would likely fade away during his second term (he hasn’t).
By: Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for America, December 4, 2014
“Unbridled Opportunism”: Republicans Want You To Be Terrified Of Ebola—So You’ll Vote For Them
The first transmission of Ebola within the United States, from Liberian visitor Thomas Eric Duncan to a Dallas nurse, marked a turning point in the political dialogue surrounding the virus toward an unbridled opportunism. The subsequent diagnosis of a second nurse and other revelations—that she took a flight shortly before she began showing symptoms, apparently with Centers for Disease Control’s approval—have only accelerated it. Obviously a degree of paranoia and sensationalism has colored the Ebola story since long before this week. But this week’s developments provided conservatives the psychological ammunition they needed to justify using the specter of a major Ebola outbreak as an election-year base-mobilization strategy.
Republican candidates like Scott Brown are now in on the game, and so is House Speaker John Boehner. Fox News, with the exception of Shepard Smith, is ginning up more Ebola terror than CNN, which had been the vanguard of Ebola hysteria until this week. Matt Drudge’s call to panic was not only deranged—
self-quarantine
—but unintentionally self-defeating, as one cannot vote if one is self-quarantined.
Engaging in the politics of fear requires a pretense. You can find people who hype mortal danger, without a sheen of plausibility, shouting into bullhorns on street corners. Politicians and their enablers need persuasive stories that make the threats sound real. And the story that many conservatives are telling about Ebola goes something like this: We’d love to eschew hysteria, and we’d love to believe our public health officials can break the chain of transmission within the U.S., but the Obama administration has proven itself untrustworthy.
“This is an episode when people want to trust the government, people need to trust the government and they can’t,” columnist George Will intoned on Fox News earlier this month. “What was happening exactly 12 months ago? A government shutdown and the disastrous rollout of Healthcare.gov. Since then we’ve had intelligence failures regarding ISIS; we’ve had the debacle of the veterans handling of healthcare; and the Secret Service that couldn’t lock the front door of the White House. So people think this is a gang that can’t shoot straight.”
University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds repackaged Will’s basic argument in USA Today on Monday. Among those he cited was “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd, who added lost IRS emails, Edward Snowden’s NSA disclosures, and the child-migrant crisis to the litany. Members of the media are enabling this opportunism. They should be anathematizing it.
The competence argument is appealing because it doesn’t require dabbling in pseudoscience or xenophobia—just healthy skepticism of our governing institutions. Moreover, I’m certain this sort of skepticism does help explain why a large minority of people in the U.S. feels at risk of contracting Ebola. But they are at no great risk. That the risk is provably infinitesimal underscores the fact that the issue with Ebola isn’t the virus itself so much as paranoia about it.
Even if each of the failures and crises enumerated above were as unambiguous and damning as the administration’s critics claim, it doesn’t follow that federal health officials aren’t up to the task of controlling Ebola, or that the public at large faces any meaningful risk. It might follow that we shouldn’t believe this season’s Affordable Care Act enrollment period will be glitch-free, and that the Vetrerans Affairs’s problems won’t be solved with new management alone. The point is not that we should never draw inferences from this administration’s previous failings. But it’s a fallacy to arbitrarily extend that second-guessing to the Ebola containment effort, while at the same time happily taking it for granted that the vast majority of things we entrust the government to do will continue apace.
Ebola carries a crucial mix of novelty, visibility, and lethality that ripens it for demagogy. But conservatives have selected a familiar line of demagogy—that you can’t trust the government to administer things and solve problems—and imposed it on to a situation where stoking reflexive distrust of the government tugs at the lid of a big Pandora’s box.
The sad irony is that state and local institutions, so beloved on the right, were apparently out to sea when Ebola arrived in Dallas, and health officials there would have let things drift further into chaos had the federal government not intruded further. Not that they’ve performed flawlessly, but we need more of their expertise and involvement, not less. Texas Governor Rick Perry—who in gentler times plays footsie with secession—is grateful for this intrusion, and has “great faith” that their efforts will succeed. Perhaps he’ll surprise us further by dismissing the idea that the federal officials who’ve stepped up against Ebola shouldn’t be trusted because about a year ago, some federal healthcare website was beset by glitches.
By: Brian Beutler, The New Republic, October 16, 2014
“For GOP, Crickets From The Pundits”: The Kentucky Senate Race And The Media’s Double Standard For Disqualifying Candidates
Last week, in the tightly contested Senate race in Kentucky, both Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell and his Democratic challenger Alison Lundergan Grimes gave newsworthy interviews in which they seemed to stumble over basic questions. But only one of the awkward missteps was treated as big news–treated even as a campaign-ending debacle–by some in the Beltway press: the Grimes interview.
Pundits pounced after Grimes refused, during an interview with the Louisville Courier-Journal editorial board, to say whether she voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. (McConnell has spent most of his campaign trying to tie Grimes to Obama, who is unpopular in Kentucky.)
After a Republican opposition group posted the clip of Grimes’ answer, the Washington Post immediately linked to it and mocked the candidate’s performance as “painful.” On MSNBC, morning host Joe Scarborough bellowed, “What a rookie mistake!” CNN commentators criticized Grimes for being “too scripted” and “evasive.”
Keep in mind; the issue itself is of no practical consequence to Kentucky voters — it doesn’t affect their day-to-day lives. But the story revolved around campaign “optics,” which Beltway commentators now thrive on, especially when it’s bad Democratic optics.
“Is she ever going to answer a tough question on anything? You want to be a U.S. senator?” demanded Meet The Press moderator, Chuck Todd. “I think she disqualified herself. I really do. I think she disqualified herself.”
Recall that query (“Is she ever going to answer a tough question on anything?”), and the way Todd described it as a disqualifying trait for a Senate candidate. Because the day before the Grimes interview, McConnell called into Kentucky Sports Radio to talk with host Matt Jones. Days earlier, the popular host had interviewed Grimes with the understanding the McConnell campaign had also agreed to an interview. But after Jones grilled Grimes on the air, McConnell’s campaign refused to answer Jones’ emails and phone calls with regards to finalizing an appearance.
After days of on-air pleas, McConnell, without advance notice, finally called into the show last Wednesday and spoke with Jones for 14 minutes. Among the actual topics covered (in the place of optics analysis) were climate change and gay marriage. McConnell basically refused to answer questions about either:
JONES: That’s a yes or no question. Do you believe in global warming?
McCONNELL: No it isn’t. It is not a yes or no question. I am not a scientist.
And here’s how McConnell danced around the issue of gay marriage:
When asked if he supports gay marriage, McConnell answered, “I believe that marriage should be between one man and one woman.” Asked why he believes that, McConnell again repeated he thinks marriage is “between one man and one woman.” Again asked “why?” McConnell repeated the same line. Jones tried one more time. Again, “It is my belief that marriage is between one man and one woman.”
To recap: If you’re a Kentucky Democrat and you don’t answer a straight-forward question, you may as well take your name off the ballot, according to Beltway journalists. But if you’re a Kentucky Republican and you do the same thing, it’s mostly crickets from the same pundits.
And again, Grimes’ election crime was to stumble over a tactical campaign question, while McConnell refused to answer questions about public policy that inform the decisions he makes as a lawmaker. So why does the Democrat get hit harder?
There’s something of a conventional wisdom among commentators that Republicans nominated much stronger candidates this election cycle. And specifically, GOP candidates aren’t out on the campaign trail making up strange and unsupported claims that could jeopardize Republican chances of reclaiming the Senate. This observation is usually made in contrast to 2010 and 2012, when untested Republican candidates such as Todd Akin, Christine O’Donnell, and Sharron Angle uncorked a series of verbal shockers and badly lost their campaigns.
Republican candidates this time around are so much more professional and focused and on-message. They’re so mainstream. Or so goes the narrative.
Keep in mind that the Republican candidate in North Carolina, Thom Tillis, says the government needs to “seal” the U.S.-Mexican border in order to protect America from the Ebola virus (via West Africa). The Republican candidate in Arkansas, Tom Cotton, thinks Mexican drug cartels are teaming up with Islamic State terrorists. And the Republican candidate in Iowa, Joni Ernst, suggested Obama be impeached because he’s “become a dictator.
All of that is complete nonsense. But Republicans don’t have to worry about candidates making crazy allegations this cycle, and Grimes is the one who flunked the competency test?
Meanwhile, Colorado Republican Senate candidate Cory Gardner repeatedly refuses to directly answer whether “humans are contributing significantly to climate change.”
That type of evasion has become a hallmark of the midterm election cycle: Faced with the very simple, yes-or-no question about whether candidates believe climate change is happening, lots of Republican in tight races now throw up their hands and suggest the topic’s just too complicated and confusing, and that once scientists stop arguing about it, they’ll be happy to address the issue.
Of course, 97 percent of scientists are in heated agreement about the topic, which makes the dodge so comical. But have we heard D.C. pundits condemning the conveyor belt of clunky dodges? Have who heard Sunday morning talk show hosts announce that any candidate who refuses to address a “tough question” about climate change (or gay marriage) has instantly disqualified him or herself?
We have not.
Question: Are there different media standards for Republicans and Democrats this election cycle?
By: Eric Boehlert, Media Matters For America, October 13, 2014
“An Odd Set Of Unspoken Rules”: How The Media Has Helped Normalize GOP Crazy
The victim of this morning’s pile-on is Kentucky Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes, who was asked in an editorial board meeting whether she had voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. Grimes hemmed and hawed a bit, obviously scared to say Yes. That isn’t too surprising — when you run as a Democrat in a red state (just as when you run as a Republican in a blue state), you spend a lot of your time explaining why you aren’t like the national party and its leaders. But some people are outraged, including Chuck Todd, who said on Morning Joe (with a look of profound disgust): “Is she ever going to answer a tough question on anything?…I think she disqualified herself. I really do, I think she disqualified herself.”
No question, Grimes botched this badly, and she should be able to answer a question as simple as this one. But this affair gets at the odd set of unspoken rules that dictate what gets designated a “gaffe” or a serious mistake, and what doesn’t.
The problem isn’t that one party gets treated more harshly than the other does. There are plenty of Republican candidates who have gotten pummeled for their “gaffes.” Rather, the problem is the standard that reporters use, probably unconsciously, to decide which gaffes are worthy of extended discussion and which ones merit only a passing mention, a standard that often lets GOP candidates get away with some appalling stuff.
For instance, when Iowa Senate candidate Joni Ernst flirted with the “Agenda 21″ conspiracy theory — a favorite of Glenn Beck, in which the U.S. government and the United Nations are supposedly conspiring to force rural people in Iowa and elsewhere to leave their homes and be relocated to urban centers — national pundits didn’t see it as disqualifying. Nor did they when it was revealed that Ernst believes not only that states can “nullify” federal laws they don’t like (they can’t); and, even crazier, that local sheriffs ought to arrest federal officials implementing the Affordable Care Act, which is quite literally a call for insurrection against the federal government. I guess those are just colorful ideas.
National observers also didn’t find it disqualifying when Tom Cotton, who is favored to become the next U.S. senator from Arkansas, expressed his belief that ISIS is now working with Mexican drug cartels to infiltrate America over our southern border.
Why do candidates like Cotton and Ernst get away with stuff like that, while Grimes gets raked over the coals for not wanting to reveal her vote and someone like Todd Akin can lose a race over his ruminations on “legitimate rape”? It’s because the standard being employed isn’t “Does this statement reveal something genuinely disturbing about this candidate?” but rather, “Is this going to be politically damaging?” Grimes’ chief area of political vulnerability is that she’s a Democrat in Kentucky, where Barack Obama’s approval ratings are low, so whenever the question of Obama comes up, reporters are watching closely to see how deftly she handles it; if she stumbles, they pounce. Akin got hammered for “legitimate rape” not so much because of how bogus and vile the idea is, but because reporters knew it could have serious consequences among women voters, given both the GOP’s constant struggles with women and the fact that Akin’s opponent was a woman.
Of course, these judgments by reporters end up being self-fulfilling prophecies: if they decide that a “gaffe” is going to have serious political effects, they give it lots of attention, which creates serious political effects.
And in the last few years, there’s a baseline of crazy from the right that the press has simply come to expect and accept, so the latest conspiracy theorizing or far-out idea from a candidate no longer strikes them as exceptional. Sure, there are exceptions: For instance, Republicans Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell both saw their candidacies derailed by their crazy or outsized statements. But their utterances were truly, deeply bizarre or comical, so they broke through.
But during this cycle, Republican crazy just hasn’t broken through at all. It’s almost as if the national press has just come to accept as normal the degree to which the GOP has moved dramatically to the right. At this point so many prominent Republicans have said insane things that after a while they go by with barely a notice. This is an era when a prominent Republican governor who wants to be president can muse about the possibility that his state might secede from the union, when the most popular radio host in the country suggests that liberals like Barack Obama want Ebola to come to America to punish us for slavery, and when the President of the United States had to show his birth certificate to prove that he isn’t a foreigner.
So ideological extremism and insane conspiracy theories from the right have been normalized. Which means that when another Republican candidate says something deranged, as long as it doesn’t offend a key swing constituency, reporters don’t think it’s disqualifying. And so it isn’t.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; The Plum Line, The Washington Post, October 10, 2014
“Who Needs ‘Meet The Press’?”: It’s Not Sunday Shows Audiences Hate, It’s Sunday Show Hosts
If you want to put your finger on the problem confronting Chuck Todd, who made his much-ballyhooed debut as moderator of NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, you don’t have to look much farther than the two “fun new features” introduced on the first show.
Todd said the recurring segment called “Who Needs Washington?” will explore politics beyond the Beltway, which this week meant interviews with mayors of cities that are “going it on their own with little of Washington’s help or dysfunction.” The second new feature is “What everyone in Washington knows but is afraid to say.” This week the thought that dare not speak its insight was “what Hillary Clinton’s really up to.”
But maybe what everyone on Meet the Press is really afraid to say is that Todd’s mission is at best inherently self-contradictory: although his new show desperately wants some outsider cred to boost the ratings, it’s not willing to risk its insider status to do so.
Talking to America’s big-city mayors is hardly new—Sunday shows have always been bringing on local pols who claim to be better at governing than the national leaders. And while the very existence of a Sunday Beltway talk show would seem to hinge on telling you what “everyone in Washington knows” and you don’t, as it turned out, neither Chuck nor his panelists had anything new to say about “what Hillary’s up to.” (And since when was anyone in the media afraid to speculate about that? The only fear you smell is their fear of admitting, “I don’t know.”)
As MTP fell from first to third place during David Gregory’s misbegotten reign, NBC brass realized that something was wrong beyond Gregory, but they weren’t sure what. “The show needs more edge,” NBC News President Deborah Turness recently declared. Format changes, she suggested, will include a panel of journalists questioning guests, as the show did in its earlier, better days. “The one-on-one conversation belongs to a decade ago,” she said. “We need more of a coffeehouse conversation.”
So just how edgy or coffeehouse was yesterday’s show? It stuck to a one-on-one interview, of President Obama, but it usefully tweaked the format so that the panel discussion was interspersed with the interview.
But only one panelist conceivably had “edge,” or his visibly tattooed armed did, anyway: Buzzfeed reporter John Stanton, who’s been a guest on Chris Hayes’s and then Steve Karnaki’s Up—a show that’s edgy enough to not broadcast its need for that quality.
But the other panelists included the usual inside-DC suspects and MSNBC stalwarts: Andrea Mitchell, who has her own MSNBC show and is married to former Fed chair Alan Greenspan; The Washington Post’s Nia-Malika Henderson, who pops up on MSNBC to convey the most conventional wisdom in the most conventional way; and Joe Scarborough, now promoted to an “NBC News senior political analyst.” It’s possible that Joe could bring the edge of his sarcastic annoyance as well as coffeehouse demeanor from Morning Joe. But on Todd’s show, Joe wasn’t allowed to play the alpha male, and he was on his best network TV behavior; he even had only nice things to say about Obama.
Try as he might—and he only might—Todd may not be able to escape the safe blandness endemic to network Sunday shows.
The shadow all the NBC anchors are trying to outgrow is Tim Russert’s, who was MTP host until he unexpectedly died in 2008. Russert had a reputation for “gotcha” journalism, in a good way. He’d use the technology of his era—tapes from the archives—to confront a guest: back then you said that, but now you say this. Some guests were rattled, but the show soon acquired a chummy atmosphere—seasoned pols would lean in and say, “You sure are good with those clips, Tim,” and then chuckle through an analysis of spin. “Meet the talking points,” critic Jay Rosen calls the show.
After all, the hosts and producers didn’t want to alienate the guests they’d need to book down the road. Even more, of course, they didn’t want to alienate the corporate sponsors. Corporations advertised on the Sunday shows to influence policy legislated by the target audience of “thought leaders.” The shows were dominated by companies like GE, Northrup Grumman and Archer Daniels Midland, who helped determine what policies and scandal were not talked about on Sunday shows. Yesterday on MTP, Koch Industries ran its big national ad that says, in so many words, they’re so powerful you’re better off working for them than boycotting them.
The idea is that these corporations are above right/left politics, a delusion the news media helps perpetuate by repeating the false equivalency canard that both political sides are equally guilty of any wrong. This Sunday, Todd kept suggesting that it won’t make any difference if the midterm elections result in a Republican or a Democratic senate majority, because gridlock will rule the day. (Obama gave a decent explanation for why that’s crazy.)
In trying to brand the show and himself, Todd has been repeating his own slogan of sorts: “It’s not politics that people hate, it’s that they hate the politicians that don’t know how to practice the art of it.” That sounds plausible, but it also sounds like a reluctance to examine underlying structural issues to focus instead on the personalities of the moment.
In fact, you might say, it’s not Sunday shows audiences hate, it’s Sunday show hosts.
But as Jason Linkins wrote, “A New Host On ‘Meet The Press’ Isn’t Going To Solve Its Problems.” He made a great case for why John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight “beats ‘Meet The Press’ coming and going. The show literally wandered right onto ‘Meet The Press’ Beltway turf and delivered a report [on the nutritional supplement industry] with a sophistication that no Sunday show has pulled off in years.” It wasn’t just the jokes that made it work, but “the show wanted to have a point” and demonstrated a “real respect and genuine concern for their audience, instead of trying to get over by posing as an ‘insider’ operating under a veil of savviness.”
Todd is smart enough to recognize the problem, but to really shake off that toxic insider status, he might consider Jay Rosen’s advice:
I think it would be wise for Chuck Todd to see himself and his colleagues, Washington journalists, as part of the class that has screwed up politics.
And maybe, in taking over “Meet the Press,” he can begin to address some of how that happened.
By: Leslie Savan, The Nation, September 8, 2014
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