“Horse Race Journalism”: Dear Ben Carson, Remember Herman Cain?
Far be it from me to spoil the pleasure of others. Goodness knows, in this vale of tears, enjoyment should be derived wherever it can be found. So please don’t take what follows as the musings of a party pooper.
According to a CBS News/New York Times poll, Ben Carson has unseated Donald Trump from the top spot in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. I feel compelled to offer this unsolicited advice to Carson and his supporters: Don’t start dancing in the end zone, at least not before the opening-game kickoff.
The CBS/NYT poll conjures ghosts of past presidential primaries.
Let’s take a trip down memory lane to years 2011 and 2007.
In the fall of 2011, with the Iowa caucuses set for January 2012, the country was treated to these headlines:
“ NBC/WSJ poll: Cain now leads GOP pack,” NBCNews.com, Oct. 13, 2011.
“Herman Cain tops Mitt Romney in latest CBS/NYT poll,” CBS News, Oct. 25, 2011.
“Herman Cain Surges in the Polls as More Republicans Get to Know Him,” Huffington Post, Oct. 26, 2011.
“Herman Cain leads as top GOP contender, edges out Mitt Romney, but needs to focus: pundits ,” New York Daily News, Nov. 12, 2011.
On Dec. 3, 2011, GOP front-runner Cain suspended his campaign amid charges of sexual misconduct, which he denied.
The road to the White House is filled with potholes.
In 2007, leading up to the Jan. 3, 2008, Iowa caucuses, the news was all about Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York.
“Poll Shows Clinton With Solid Lead Among Democrats,” The Post, July 23, 2007.
“Clinton Sustains Huge Lead in Democratic Nomination Race,” Gallup, Nov. 16, 2007. “48% of Democrats say they are most likely to support Clinton for the party’s presidential nomination in 2008, followed by Obama at 21%,” Gallup reported.
We know how that story ended.
This presidential campaign is unfolding the same old, same old way.
Once again, we in the news media, with the help of the campaigns, are hyping the hell out of an election that is many months away from producing results.
Our journalism is shaped by the need to (cliche coming) “fill air time and column inches.” Clueless about the final outcome, we, the media, focus instead on the horse-race aspect of the contest: “Who’s ahead? Who’s behind? Who’s catching up? Who’s falling back?”
Greg Marx, an editor with the Columbia Journalism Review, and John Sides, a George Washington University professor who writes for The Post’s Monkey Cage blog, have done incisive work on “horse-race journalism” and early campaign polling, respectively.
They would agree, I believe, that the combination of the news media’s horse-race mentality and the fixation on polls conducted months out from an election may add suspense and keep the public’s juices flowing, but they tell us little about how voters will behave on Election Day.
Nonetheless, we press on with our efforts to build excitement and (confession coming) our own reputations.
Then there’s the added attraction of the presidential debates, where the candidates get to audition for the roles of presidential nominee and media critic, and moderators try out as prosecutors hired to match wits with candidates suspected of having some degree of darkness in their pasts. Case in point: Wednesday night’s CNBC Republican debate.
Candidates unlikely to ever reach the Oval Office, except as invited guests — to wit: Carson, Chris Christie, Bobby Jindal, Lindsey Graham, Carly Fiorina, Mike Huckabee, John Kasich, Rand Paul, Rick Santorum and George Pataki, along with Democratic candidate Martin O’Malley — thrive on debates, as they’re the only way for them to attract media attention.
For many in the viewing public, however, it’s all a great show, sort of like watching the lions vs. the Christians.
At this stage in the campaign season, the question of electability takes a back seat to a curiosity that borders on morbid.
Which brings us back to Carson. He will be repeating Cain’s mistake if he believes the polls suggest that he is being taken seriously. The results say no such thing.
Carson, like Cain, is a novelty candidate, someone unusual: he, a soft-spoken, self-effacing African American retired neurosurgeon and reactionary to the core; Cain, a gregarious African American former Burger King and Godfather’s Pizza executive and a 9-9-9 devotee.
Carson’s newness to Republican politics adds to his standing vis-à-vis a GOP field that is ideologically the same, mainly predictable and, in the case of several second-tier candidates, downright dull.
Today’s polls do not, and cannot, predict how the Republican electorate will vote in next year’s primaries and caucuses.
And that brings into play the old adage, “in politics, overnight is a lifetime.”
Carsonites, keep that in mind.
By: Colbert I. King, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 30, 2015
“What Ben Carson’s Rise Says About America”: We’ve Reached The Point Where Ignorance Really Is Bliss
So it’s Ben Carson’s moment. He’s overtaken Donald Trump in a CBS/New York Times national poll and he’s ahead in Iowa now with the caucuses just three months away. The Times is writing nice profiles of him full of polite euphemisms like “lack of governing experience.” First we all got used to the idea that it wasn’t insane to think that Donald Trump could be the GOP nominee. And now we have to acclimate ourselves to the idea it could be Carson, too.
The only actual interesting thing about Carson is that he raises a question we rarely get the chance to contemplate: How can a man who is so obviously distinguished and brilliant in one field be such an across-the-board nincompoop in another? Because usually, if a man (or woman) is a good and knowledgeable and sure-footed doctor, or lawyer or department chair or any other position that could have been attained only through repeated displays of excellence and probity, then that person will also be a pretty solid human being across the board. He or she might be right wing or left wing, and he or he might have a weakness for French New Wave cinema or for Rock Hudson-Doris Day movies; but s/he won’t be an idiot.
But Carson is a political idiot. And it’s not all the Nazi and slavery talk, although those are certainly stupid and crude comparisons that can only be invoked by people who are dumb enough—and, I should add, insensitive enough—never to have given serious thought to the grisly particulars of what Nazism and slavery entailed. Whatever you think of Obamacare, you actually have to be a ghastly human being to compare it to practice in which horrors like this happened all the time, to many millions of people.
And these rants of his against political correctness! We’re getting to be like (again) Nazi Germany? Is he serious? Yes, he is. Imagine how ignorant of history a person has to be to think that today’s pc police, annoying as they sometimes are, can be compared to the SA or the SS? It’s insulting even to have to hear it.
So all that is plenty bad, but even more, I mean nearly everything else that comes out of this mouth. Just Google “Ben Carson ignorance” and you’ll see quickly enough that on subjects ranging from science to foreign policy to the Constitution to virtually any political or historical or policy topic on which he chooses to speak, he says something that has no basis in real-world fact.
How does a man who is (presumably, anyway) in his chosen realm a man of science and empirical knowledge and testing of hypotheses enter this other realm and become someone who just spends his time scouring the most lunatic right-wing websites there are and repeating back everything he reads there as if it’s true? That’s where that madness about how armed Jews could have prevented the Holocaust comes from—it started about 20 years ago, and there is nothing about it that’s true. But the notion lives a healthy life on right-wing and pro-gun websites and chat boards. Great weight is given in those circles to a supposed quote from Hitler extolling gun control. But as Alex Seitz-Wald showed in this Salon piece in which he quotes leading scholars, Hitler almost certainly never said it.
Now, none of this is shocking to you, if you follow these things at all. There are all kinds of matters on which conservatives have their own version of reality. I remember being astonished back when we were all first getting to know a certain half-term Alaska governor to learn, via some dodgy and weird creationistic answer she gave to some question, that there’s this excavation site in, predictably enough, Texas, called the Taylor Trail, where there exists “evidence” that man and dinosaur walked together. So this kind of thing goes on all the time out there in this big country of ours.
But what doesn’t go on all the time is that a man who gets his ideas about the world from conspiracy-theory websites is a leading presidential candidate—or that his idiot comments not only don’t hurt him but help him. I’d reckon some of you saw that poll last week asking Iowa Republicans whether X statement about Carson raised or lowered their esteem of him. His comparison of Obamacare to slavery was considered “attractive” by 81 percent of those polled, and gave just 16 percent the willies.
It’s one of the great cons of the year that Carson gets to be called “mild-mannered.” How many people who think that getting health insurance is worse than being held in bondage get to be called mild-mannered? And how arrogant a man must Carson be—what made him think he should be the president of the United States in the first place? There are lots of distinguished surgeons out there. So why him?
And now we have this debate coming up Wednesday. Carson did pretty badly in the first couple debates—he was unfocused and off-point and spoke in the kind of generalities that left you wondering what he really meant. But did it hurt? No, it helped him! Now, Trump and maybe some of the others are going to come after him. So we’ll see how he holds up.
But it hardly matters. If he misstates some facts, no one’s going to care. And if he pulls a big whopper—locating a country on the wrong continent, not knowing some obvious point of history—that too will just help him, because to the Carson people it will just be the liberal media piling on the poor man. We’ve reached the point where ignorance really is bliss.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, October 27, 2015
“There Isn’t Going To Be An Evangelical President”: Huckabee Doesn’t Seem To Understand The Place Of Evangelicals In Today’s GOP
There was no doubt that when Mike Huckabee announced his candidacy for president, God would come up. After all, Huckabee is an ordained Baptist minister who made a strong showing in his 2008 race in large part because of the support of evangelical voters. Huckabee made crystal clear that he’s running to get the support of those evangelical voters again.
Huckabee talked about how much he prayed in school as a child in Hope, Arkansas, where he “learned that this exceptional country could only be explained by the Providence of God.” He asserted that “the Supreme Court is not the Supreme Being, and they can’t overturn the laws of nature or of nature’s God,” a clear reference to same-sex marriage.
But for someone who wants to be the candidate of evangelicals, Huckabee doesn’t seem to understand the place of evangelicals in today’s GOP.
Huckabee’s most fundamental miscalculation has two parts: first, that there can be one candidate who garners the support of most religious right voters, and second, that even if he pulled that off, it would be enough to make him the party’s nominee (for the purposes of this discussion I’m going to talk about evangelicals and the religious right interchangeably, but they’re obviously not exactly the same thing).
If you’re an evangelical Republican voter looking for a presidential candidate who shares your values, you’re faced with an embarrassment of riches in this election. In addition to Huckabee, you’ve got Scott Walker (the son of a Baptist minister), Rick Santorum (whose commitment to “traditional values” will stack up against anyone’s), Rick Perry (whose best-remembered ad from four years ago began, “I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a Christian,” tapping into the religious right’s narrative of oppression), Bobby Jindal (who holds prayer rallies), and other candidates like Ted Cruz and Ben Carson who wear their piety on their sleeves. With all that to choose from, it will simply be impossible for any one of them to become the candidate of the religious right.
Huckabee might say, well, I was pretty much the candidate of the religious right in 2008, and I won Iowa! Indeed he did — and then he lost the nomination, as did Rick Santorum four years later following the same script. Evangelicals are particularly important in that first caucus state, but far less so in the rest of the country, which is why their chosen Iowa candidate almost never wins. They made up 57 percent of GOP Iowa caucus voters in 2012 — but only 43 percent of Romney’s voters in the general election, and only 26 percent of general election voters overall.
Furthermore, there are plenty of evangelicals who aren’t so attracted to the old-school style of a man who wrote columns as a teenager warning against the evils of dancing. Here’s how religion reporter Sarah Posner describes the feelings of many evangelicals, particularly younger ones:
These evangelicals are listening for a candidate who can signal he is “one of us” without pandering. Both evangelical and Catholic candidates who have earned the culture warrior label for their strident pronouncements—Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum, or Mike Huckabee — are seen as embarrassing embodiments of stereotypes these conservative Christians would like to shed.
When the entertainment at Huckabee’s announcement event is Tony Orlando singing “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree” — a song that topped the charts 42 years ago — he isn’t exactly reaching out to a new generation.
Does this mean that the evangelical vote no longer matters in the Republican primaries? Not at all. It still matters a great deal, but the fact that evangelicals won’t vote as a bloc means they matter in a different way. If any of the candidates can get at least some of their votes, then every candidate has an interest in speaking to them (or pandering to them, depending on how you want to think about it). So their concerns and their issues will be on all the candidates’ minds and on their lips.
The evangelical vote is still important, but there won’t be an evangelical champion — Mike Huckabee, or anyone else. Yes, an evangelical such as Scott Walker might be elected president. But he wouldn’t be the evangelicals’ chosen candidate. No one will.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, May 6, 2015
The Missing “Leveling Experience”: Dull Mitt Romney Needs A “Groping” Scandal
Republican front-runner Mitt Romney is so dull that he could benefit from an eye-popping scandal because it would help tear down his plastic image and make him look more normal, according to national pollster John Zogby.
“This is the one instance where a groping incident could help a candidate,” said Zogby, in a reference to the scandal that torpedoed former GOP candidate Herman Cain’s campaign.
He said it could be the missing “leveling experience” for Romney that would make him look more human. Zogby explained that many stiff, rich men have run for office and won, but they typically had a humbling moment that made them more likeable. He gave former President George W. Bush’s alcoholism as an example of that leveling experience.
“His problem is an authenticity problem,” said Zogby of Romney, who today released his New Hampshire tracking poll that has Romney far in front. “He’s the kid who never colored outside the lines,” said the pollster.
Zogby said Romney needs to find a way to connect with an unethusiastic party that wants to vote with its brain and heart. But, he warned, he shouldn’t try to do that with a policy speech or new position. “Likability,” he said, “is a lot more than an issue.”
He echoed charges from competing campaigns and President Obama’s advisor David Axelrod that Romney’s 25 percent finish in the Iowa caucuses was an example of how he’s failed to expand his personal base of voters from the amount he received in the 2008 caucuses.
Romney, Zogby said, spent “a lot of time, money and energy to get where he was already.”
By: Paul Bedard, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, January 5, 2012
Can Mitt Romney Ever Flip Back Again?
The deflating open secret of the Iowa caucuses is that they don’t matter. Mitt Romney has won the Republican nomination by default. He was, and remains, wildly vulnerable to a conservative challenger. But the challenger needed to clear a modest threshold: having a national organization, enough money to engage in advertising wars, and the ability to recite standard party dogma in the form of complete sentences. Rick Perry had the first two but fell woefully short of the third. Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum could pass the third but not the first two.
Remarkably, the many Republicans who could have beaten Romney all decided not to enter the race or, in the case of Tim Pawlenty, dropped out prematurely. The challengers to Romney devoted all their energies to attacking each other – not a single attack ad against Romney even aired in Iowa. None of his many, enormous vulnerabilities has been exploited. The profusely bleeding, one-armed man managed to swim through shark-infested waters because most of the sharks drowned or decided either to eat each other instead of him.
But what kind of president would Romney be?
George Packer, in a terrific column about the casual acceptance of hysterical charges in the GOP, argues that Romney has crossed a threshold of wingnuttery from which he can never return:
It would be a mistake, though, to believe that, long after Iowa, once the horse race is over, and if he’s elected, Romney could suddenly flip a switch, clear the air of the toxicity left behind by the Republican field, and return to being a cautious centrist whose most reassuring quality is his lack of principles. His party wouldn’t let him; and, after all, how a candidate runs shapes how a President governs. In politics, once a sellout, always a sellout; once a thug, always a thug.
I agree with Packer’s conclusion but not his reasoning. There is actually a pretty close analogue to Romney: George H.W. Bush. The scion of a moderate, Establishment Republican, Bush abandoned his views on abortion and supply-side economics in order to curry favor with a party moving right, and was elected president by running a dishonest and viciously demagogic campaign. Once in office, Bush fulfilled the fears of his conservative critics by governing as a real moderate. The campaign did not shape the presidency.
The difference is that Bush faced a Democratic Congress. If faced with similar circumstances, we would probably see the old Massachusetts Romney reemerge. But, if elected, he is far more likely to enjoy a Republican Congress. An interesting theme in the conservative commentary today is that Republicans, while not thrilled about Romney, truly seem to believe that he will serve as a faithful vessel for the Party’s agenda. Here is Republican member of Congress Tom Cole:
“The real division in the GOP these days is not between moderates and conservatives. It is between pragmatists and ideologues. That same division plays itself out almost every day in the House and Senate GOP Conferences,” Cole continued. “The next GOP president will be forced to govern as a conservative to maintain the support of the GOP rank and file and its caucuses in both the House and Senate. Anyone who thinks we are going to nominate an Eisenhower, Nixon or Ford is out of touch with the GOP electorate. And any GOP politician who believes he can govern from the White House as anything other than a conservative is delusional.”
This is almost surely correct. A President Romney would have little leeway to push a GOP Congress to the center, and he has pledged himself to fulfill the agenda that the Party has already determined. Former Bush administration Minister of Propaganda Pete Wehner echoes, “This year, it seems to me, the party is the sun and the candidates are the planets … They are trying to prove to primary voters that they are reliable and trustworthy when it comes to the basic platform of the GOP.”
It is surely clear that Romney’s apparent victory was obtained by erasing every last vestige of his old and (I believe, though I can’t be sure) authentic self. At this moment hardly anybody believes that his conversion was actually authentic. The support for him, such as it is, is simply a combination of disqualifying rivals and the assumption that the Party will continue to own him in office.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, January 3, 2012
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