How The Media Made Ron Paul
Ask just about any candidate’s hardcore supporters whether the media is giving their guy a fair shake and chances are you’ll be greeted with an emphatic “No!” and all sorts of supposedly egregious examples to prove the point.
But this sentiment is particularly pronounced among Ron Paul’s backers, who have flooded message boards, comments sections and journalist inboxes all year with claims that the press is essentially conspiring to ignore the Texas congressman and his libertarian message — and that the only thing separating him from front-runner status in the GOP presidential race is a level of coverage commensurate with the other major candidates.
The Paul-ites haven’t been entirely wrong. It’s now clear that Paul has significantly expanded his support from four years ago, could win Iowa (and maybe even New Hampshire), and is positioned to gobble up a significant chunk of delegates and perhaps give his party’s establishment the scare of a lifetime. But even though the warning signs have been there for months, the press didn’t seem to notice until very recently. What Paul’s loyalists haven’t appreciated, though, is how helpful — vital even — the media’s lack of interest has been to their candidate’s rise.
Just consider the current uproar over the racist political newsletters that were sent out under Paul’s name (and used to fund his political activities) in the early 1990s. The story is hardly new, but to many voters it feels new because — like Paul himself — it’s been ignored by the press all year.
This is a perk of being dismissed by the press as a fringe figure. In 1996, when he made his comeback bid for a House seat in Texas, Paul briefly had to confront the newsletters, but once he was elected and became an entrenched incumbent, the issue was largely dropped by the local press (old news) and ignored by the national media, who saw him as just a gadfly backbencher. And when he ran for president in 2008, it didn’t come up until very late in the cycle, when some staggering fundraising numbers briefly compelled the political world to notice him. But almost as soon as it exploded back then, the story went away, with the media regarding Paul’s relatively weak early primary showings as proof that his base of support was very loud and very narrow and that he wasn’t worth taking seriously.
And that, more or less, was how the media treated Paul’s current campaign until the past few weeks.
In a way, this was understandably infuriating to Paul and his supporters. Over the summer, for instance, he nearly won the Iowa straw poll, netting the third most votes in the event’s history — evidence, in hindsight, that he really had grown his Iowa support since ’08. But reporters and commentators (present company included) were largely dismissive of the accomplishment, seeing it mainly as further, unneeded proof of the devotion of Paul’s army and not a sign that something might be stirring.
But the virtual press blackout also meant that the newsletters weren’t being mentioned, and that Paul wasn’t facing the intense day-to-day scrutiny that took a toll on other GOP candidates when they enjoyed breakthrough moments this year. It allowed him to present himself to audiences on his own terms and helped him become something of a sympathetic figure. In effect, Paul was able to take advantage of the many nontraditional means of communicating with voters that now exist without those voters being subjected to screaming mainstream press headlines about Paul controversies and gaffes. How many of the new supporters Paul gained these past few years didn’t know anything about the newsletters until this month?
Paul has argued that major media outlets have ignored him because they are “frightened” by his unconventional views, particularly his foreign policy noninterventionism. This is not a baseless assertion, but it’s probably overstated. Certainly, a compelling case can be made that the most important media entity in Republican politics, Fox News, has gone out of its way to treat Paul as a nobody because of his rejection of the GOP’s “war on terror” orthodoxy.
But for most of the political press, the explanation is simpler: Paul’s noninterventionism (and the blatant hostility toward him from key GOP voices like Fox) imposes a unique ceiling on his intraparty support and makes it very easy to dismiss him as a serious contender for the nomination. The experience of 2008, when Paul briefly succeeded in making the press second-guess itself only to wind up an asterisk in the primary season, reinforced this impression. To his credit, Paul once again forced media second-guessing this time around, with his rise to first place in Iowa polling this month — a development that almost immediately prompted Fox News to change gears and shower attention on him and his newsletters and for the rest of the political media to pursue the newsletter story as well, with disastrous results for Paul.
This saga could cost Paul much of the new support he’s won since ’08, will make expanding his base much further all but impossible (even if he does win Iowa next week), and will probably cement his status as a fringe figure. The fallout will be more permanent than it was in 2008 or in 1996 because this time the whole political world is watching. And the reason the whole political world is watching is because Paul managed to reach polling heights that no one believed were possible. And he only reached those polling heights because from January 2008 until December 2011 the media pretty much ignored him.
By: Steve Kornacki, Salon, December 27, 2011
How Social Conservatives Blew It In Iowa
The 2012 “invisible primary” is looking likely to end just how and where it began: with Republican ideologues anxiously looking to Iowa for signs of an electable “true conservative” alternative to Mitt Romney. Depending on whom you ask, they have found no such candidate, or have found too many of them. In either case, despite their fevered hopes the First-in-the-Nation Caucus is not likely to play its intended role as an all-important arbiter where ideological squishes are disciplined or destroyed and the faithful find their champion. Indeed, from the perspective of a conservative movement hoping to consolidate its control over the GOP once and for all and make 2012 the beginning of the end for the New Deal, Iowa has been a big failure.
The sad spectacle of the FAMiLY Leader organization—whose board, after administering a controversial pledge document and then holding a candidate forum, could not reach agreement on an endorsement—is something of a microcosm of the Right’s failure to separate the sheep from the goats throughout the invisible primary. While FAMiLY Leader chieftains Bob Vander Plaats and Chuck Hurley eventually supplied “personal” endorsements for Rick Santorum, Vander Plaats has been subsequently begging Santorum supporters to contribute money to enable him to actually campaign for his candidate—a sign of the gesture’s probable futility. Given the fact that they are appealing to largely the same constituencies and are hardly flush with cash, neither Santorum nor Michele Bachmann seem very likely to win a big “ticket out of Iowa.” And Rick Perry, once the favorite of the Christian Right, is still holding onto an impressive war chest that will likely sustain him, but he’s got precious little else going for him other than the hope that he, rather than Gingrich, will survive through New Hampshire to make a late appeal to southerners. For his part, Newt has not been haunting the highways and byways of Iowa all that obsessively either; the big news for his campaign this week has been its opening of an all-volunteer headquarters in Sioux City, just his second outpost in the entire state.
Meanwhile, neither Mitt Romney nor Ron Paul seems likely to be influenced by the results in Iowa at all. While it’s true that Romney has moved decisively to the right in order to make himself minimally acceptable to today’s conservatives, he’s done so out of deference to the primary process as a whole—not the glare of publicity and pressure on the Iowa campaign trail, which he has largely ignored until very, very recently. Indeed, the main Romney footprint in the state has been via the nasty attack ads on Newt Gingrich launched by the “Restore the Future” super-PAC backing Romney. And while Ron Paul has done well in the target-rich Iowa environment of a low-turnout caucus (lots of home-schoolers and lots of eager college students), it’s not as though he’s doing much of anything he hasn’t been doing for many years. Moreover, it is certain that Paul’s campaign will continue right up until the convention no matter how he does in Iowa.
So the caucuses themselves will probably only cull one candidate from the field, no more than the Iowa Straw Poll back in August that ended Tim Pawlenty’s campaign. As Jonathan Bernstein has recently explained, barring a real upset Iowa’s influence over the nominating contest may well be reduced to spin: Did this or that candidate beat expectations, or set the table for success down the road? That is not a meaningless role to play, but after absorbing so many months of candidate and media attention, it’s hardly ideal from the point of view of Iowa triumphalists who consider their strange contest the epitome of deliberative democracy.
And for the high-riding right wing of the Republican Party—be they denoted as Tea Partiers, the Christian Right, or “constitutional conservatives”—it’s been a long and arguably pointless trip. Unable to use the unique leverage of Iowa to elevate Tim or Michele or Rick or Herman or Newt or the other Rick, they are now looking at genuinely long odds for denying the nomination to the man they do not want, Mitt Romney, who is more and more looking like the Richard Nixon of the early twenty-first century: the lowest common denominator of a political party in which leadership is in painfully short supply.
By: Ed Kilgore, The New Republic, December 23, 2011
Michele Bachmann’s Mis-statements May Be Catching Up To Her
Michele Bachmann was laying out a tough immigration policy recently when she veered off script to make a point that she said underscored the national security implications of a porous border.
“Fifty-nine thousand this year came across the border, as was said in the introduction, from Yemen, from Syria. These are nations that are state sponsors of terror,” the Minnesota congresswoman and Republican presidential candidate said, citing a report she had heard. “They’re coming into our country!”
There were two problems with Bachmann’s passionate assertion. Yemen is not a state sponsor of terrorism, according to the State Department. And the Border Patrol report to which Bachmann referred said that while 59,000 apprehended illegal immigrants came from countries other than Mexico, only 663 had ties to countries with links to terrorism.
Voters here frequently say they are drawn to support Bachmann’s presidential campaign by the litany of statistics and facts that stud her speeches. Yet what she says is often inaccurate, misleading or wildly untrue.
All politicians occasionally shade the facts to their advantage. The danger for Bachmann is that her misstatements are so pronounced and so numerous that they erode her effort to regain footing in the presidential race. (Asked for reaction, a campaign aide provided information unrelated to the statements in question.)
Some of her misstatements have registered as eye-rolling blips, such as when she confused actor John Wayne with serial killer John Wayne Gacy on the day she entered the campaign in June. Others have damaged her candidacy.
She won points in a September debate when she assailed Texas Gov. Rick Perry for supporting a proposed requirement that young girls be vaccinated against a sexually transmitted disease. But then Bachmann told a post-debate television audience that the vaccine had caused mental retardation, a conclusion drawn from a brief meeting with a weeping mother. Bachmann’s hit against Perry was lost in howls of dismay from physicians who said her untrue remarks would discourage vaccination and endanger children.
On recent campaign swings through Iowa, she continued to trip over matters large and small.
In Sioux Center, Bachmann said high corporate taxes and crushing regulations had made the United States less competitive than other countries, a mantra common among GOP candidates. But then she went further.
“If you want to have a business in China today, if you want to build a building, you just build it, you don’t go through all the permitting process that we do here,” she said.
Businesses have to apply for multiple permits in China. A 2008 World Bank publication found that China was among the most difficult places anywhere to obtain construction permits, ranking No. 176 of 181. The publication ranked the best and worst places, and the United States fell in neither category.
At a rally in Denison, Bachmann touted her plan to slash federal taxes and implied that taxes are higher now than when she was young.
“How many of you think that the taxes are too high in the United States? We got any takers on that?” she said as the crowd roared in approval. “I grew up in this wonderful state and I’ll tell you, the tax rate was completely different years ago from what it is now, wasn’t it? They’re very high.”
In 2011, a married couple filing jointly would have paid 35 percent of their income in taxes if they made $379,150, the lowest income in the top bracket, according to the nonpartisan Tax Foundation. Fifty years ago, when Bachmann was a child, the same couple would have paid 59 percent in federal taxes. The lowest federal tax bracket today is half what it was then.
The candidate bases at least some of her assertions on obscure conspiracy theories.
In Estherville, after a supporter asked her position on the Second Amendment, Bachmann said she supported Americans’ rights to own guns and that she had a permit to carry a concealed weapon.
But then she added: “I don’t believe in the U.N. taking that right away from us, as well. There are international treaties that want to do that.”
The United Nations is drafting an arms treaty, but it is aimed at stemming illegal international gun sales. While many gun manufacturers are concerned that such a treaty could lead to broader gun registration, only a narrow fringe purports that Americans could see their guns taken away by the U.N., which has no authority over constitutional rights.
Bachmann’s mistakes predate her entry into the presidential race. In November, she told a national television audience that a trip by President Barack Obama to India cost $200 million a day. The report was based on an anonymous quotation in an Indian newspaper.
The White House does not release cost figures for security reasons, but people involved in travel by presidents from both political parties said the number was grossly exaggerated.
An embarrassing correction also marked a recent Bachmann move on Capitol Hill. Earlier this month, she introduced a bill requiring any woman considering an abortion to undergo an ultrasound that pinpoints the heartbeat of the fetus.
“A study by Focus on the Family found that when women who were undecided about having an abortion were shown an ultrasound image of the baby, 78% chose life,” Bachmann said.
That prompted a news release from the conservative organization, which said that while it supports the legislation, it had produced no such report.
“We don’t have any ‘studies,’ and we don’t publish any percentages like that,” Kelly Rosati, Focus on the Family’s vice president of community outreach, said in a statement.
A Bachmann aide said the candidate got the statistic from a Des Moines clinic. The aide also cited a report that appeared in the Rocky Mountain News of Denver that cited a Focus on the Family statistician for a similar claim.
By: Seema Mehta, McClatchy-Tribune News Service, October 23, 2011
“Just Say It”: For Michele Bachmann, Ignorance Is Bliss
What a wonderful world! My daughter brought me a satellite radio for my birthday and I have been listening to the classic hits of the’50s. I call the station “50s on the Five for 50-Somethings.” Unfortunately every time I hear the classic 1950s song “What a Wonderful World” by the great Sam Cooke, I think of Michele Bachmann. Why? Because of the opening words, “Don’t’ know much about history. Don’t know much biology.”
Earlier this year, Bachmann said that the Battles of Lexington and Concord, which started the Revolutionary War, were fought in New Hampshire when every school kid knows the battles were fought in Massachusetts. Any day, I expect her to say that Kaiser Willy should have been tried for war crimes for starting World War II.
Earlier this year, the conservative congresswoman described homosexuality as “sexual dysfunction.” She may be surprised to know that the American Medical Association doesn’t list homosexuality as a sexual dysfunction. Representative Bachmann has promised to release her healthcare proposal to the public shortly. Her husband tries to convince gays that they are straight and my guess is her solution to the healthcare crisis will be to convince the sick and injured that they’re felling just fine.
I would add meteorology to biology and history on the list of things she doesn’t know much about. She said that hurricane Irene was a warning to politicians to reduce government spending. Her spokesperson said the candidate made the statement “in jest”. The congresswoman has a sick sense of humor. I don’t think a joke about a disaster that killed dozens of people and caused billion of dollars in damage is very funny. I wonder what other kinds of disasters Representative Bachmann thinks are funny.
The congresswoman from Minnesota is chair of the Tea Party Caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives and her statements make her perfect for the job. The Tea Party has a new motto, “Just Say It,” which is why a recent New York Times/CBS News national survey shows the group’s negative has doubled from 18 percent to 40 percent in the last year. The nominee of the Party of Tea, the party formerly known as the GOP will drown with the weight of the Tea Party brand wrapped around him or her like an anchor.
Ever wonder why Americans dislike the Tea Party? Wonder no more. At a recent presidential campaign rally last week in Iowa, Robin Murphy of West Des Moines, Iowa, told Representative Bachmann. “I don’t like what I see in Obama—him being born in Kenya and trying to cover up the birth certificate thing. And him being Muslim and trying to pretend he’s a Christian.”
As she held Ms. Murphy’s hand, Representative Bachmann made no effort to correct the misstatements that the Iowan made about the president. The Minnesotan could have responded to her supporter with a criticism of the president for his economic policies but also reminded her that the president was born in Hawaii and is a Christian. But Representative Bachmann didn’t. If ignorance is bliss, Tea Partyers must be ecstatic.
I lost electricity, Internet, and phones for a day and a half in the aftermath of Irene. It was actually pleasant to be out of touch with the rest of the world for awhile. I knew what it was like being a member of the Tea Party.
Robin Murphy’s statements sound sweet to Tea Partyers and religious conservatives but they taste sour to the independent suburban voters who are sick of right wing rhetoric. As long as Congresswoman Bachmann and her supporters lie about the president’s background, they won’t get any play from the moderate swing voters who will choose the next president in November of 2012. I doubt Tea Partyers will change their rhetoric though because they live in a wonderful world all their own.
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, September 1, 2011
This Texan Ain’t Shooting Straight: Rick Perry’s Double Talk On Social Security And The Constitution
This we know: Texas Gov. Rick Perry, the apparent GOP 2012 front-runner, doesn’t like Social Security.
He has, for example, described it in his recent book as not only a “Ponzi scheme,” but “by far the best example” of a program “violently tossing aside any respect for our founding principles,” and as having been put in place “at the expense of respect for the Constitution and limited government.” Elsewhere he has said that the Constitution’s “general welfare” clause does not cover Social Security and Medicare. In other words not only is Social Security bad policy, Perry believes, but actually in defiance of our founding principles in general and the Constitution in particular.
While he and his campaign had appeared to dance away from these characterizations, Perry was at it again in Iowa over the weekend, calling the program a “monstrous lie,” and saying that he stood by everything in his book (including, presumably, Social Security’s unconstitutionality).
So here’s what I want to know: What would President Rick Perry do about Social Security?
It’s one thing to note that Perry makes crazy comments. As Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen notes, “Perry is positioning himself well outside the American mainstream. It’s going to impress the Republican Party’s far-right base, but it won’t impress anyone else.”
But there is a necessary connection between views and policies. What would Perry’s policy toward Social Security be in the White House?
As it happens, he answered that question, in part, during his Iowa campaign swing. This from the Houston Chronicle:
He told the Ottumwa crowd that for people who are drawing Social Security or near eligibility “like me,” he wasn’t proposing a change in the program. But he said there should be a national conversation about potential changes for others, including raising the age of eligibility and establishing a threshold based on a person’s means.
“Does Warren Buffett need to get Social Security? Maybe not,” he said.
Huh? Let me see if I understand this. Social Security “violently tossed aside any respect for our founding principles,” and was instituted at the “expense of respect for the Constitution.” And his solution to these problems is … means testing? And a national conversation about entitlement reform?
Those responses seem awfully conventional for a pol who is so self-consciously talking such a big, radical game about one of the nation’s beloved government programs. Either he’s tossing cow chips when he decries the program, or has something else under his hat when he spouts mealy-mouthed solutions to what he sees as its problems. But either way, this Texan ain’t shooting straight.
Reporters should press Perry on Social Security—does he really believe the program is unconstitutional? If so, doesn’t he have an obligation to defend the Constitution by ending the illegal program (including for people drawing it or nearing eligibility)? And if not, what exactly does he mean when he says that the program violently tosses aside respect for the Constitution? And if it is constitutional, what is its constitutional basis, if not the general welfare clause?
If that all seems a bit much, maybe the moderator of the next GOP debate can boil it down simply: “Raise your hand if you think Social Security is unconstitutional.”
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, August 29, 2011
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