Topics: Republican Party, Democratic Party, Karl Rove, Books, Entertainment News
The core attitude of the political press — and the dominant theme of our political dialogue for the last two decades — was summarized perfectly by the media’s unrestrained id, Chris Matthews. While speaking with Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean in September 2007, Matthews lamented that Democrats continuously nominate “weird” geeks and losers while the Republicans put forth strong, “charming” tough guys:
MATTHEWS: Why do Democrats keep running these weird presidential candidates, who always seem — ever since Jack Kennedy and maybe, well, Bill Clinton, they always lose the personality question. They always seem geekier, nerdier than the Republican guy. Why is that the case?DEAN: How do you really feel about that, Chris?
MATTHEWS: Well, it’s true. It’s an objective assessment. Look at Dukakis in the tank. That’s an objective reality. I mean, Mondale.
DEAN: Let me tell you — let me tell you what we have to do.
MATTHEWS: Jesus, a good guy, but unacceptable on television.
The Republicans, they get the charm school. They got Reagan. They have got this guy George W. Bush. You know, they seem to run charming people.
DEAN: What Democrats have to do is talk about their vales. People vote on values. They don’t vote on position papers.
MATTHEWS: No, they vote on personalities.
Earlier in the year, in August, Matthews announced that the Democratic presidential field suffered from a major deficiency:
I don’t see a big, beefy alternative to Hillary Clinton — a big guy. You know what I mean? An … everyday big guy. I don’t see one out there. I see a lot of slight, skinny, second- and third-rate candidates.The vast bulk of our political press has a single-minded, adolescent obsession with the petty personality traits of political candidates in lieu of any interest in their positions or abilities. Here was the “Washington Post”‘s Joel Achenbach’s analysis of the 1988 presidential election:
That’s one reason people like Bill Richardson: He looks like a good eater. They liked that about Bill Clinton, too …Years ago I heard an anecdote about Mike Dukakis, and I’m sure I’ll mangle it, but here’s the gist as I dimly recall it: Coupla big union guys, beefy fellows, came to see Dukakis at his home in Brookline, thinking about endorsing him. Dukakis asked them if they wanted a beer. Sure, they said. So he gets out a beer and two glasses, and pours half the beer in one glass and half the beer in the other.
Lost the election right there.
Achenbach went on to explain that Mitt Romney picks the cheese off his pizza, which was a significant liability, since “I just can’t imagine the American people electing as president someone who does that to pizza.” As always, they justify their vapid gossip by patronizingly claiming that it’s what the little people are interested in — all grounded in their condescending fantasies about the political assessments of the salt-of-the-earth simpletons who comprise the voting masses — but this sort of childish, barren yapping is, in reality, representative of nothing other than how our empty Beltway media thinks.
That has been the dominant media theme for the last two decades in our political discourse, and particularly in our national elections. Leave policy and ideology to the side. Just ignore it. What matters is that Democrats and liberals are weak, effete, elitist, nerdy, military-hating, gender-confused losers, whose men are effeminate, whose women are emasculating dykes, and who merit sneering mockery and derision. Republican right-wing male leaders are salt-of-the-earth, wholesome, likable tough guys — courageous warriors and normal family men who merit personal admiration and affection.
The Republican Party pioneered by Lee Atwater, Roger Ailes, and Karl Rove will redeploy these same personality-based themes in the 2008 election because it is all they know and, more important, because nothing has yet ended the efficacy of such deceitful strategies. A shallow and gossipy press continues to eat it up.
Indeed, the GOP has been able to pervert our political process this way only because of the indispensable aid of the establishment media, which reflexively views the political landscape through the lens of this GOP-generated mythology. The strain of petty personality-based gossip in which the GOP has come to specialize appeals to our media stars for a whole range of reasons. Catty attacks are cheap and easy to cover, and require few resources and even less critical thought to convey. Even the shallowest and most slothful reporters are able to dish about the Clintons’ marital problems or how Barack Obama looks in a bathing suit.
Herd behavior, peer pressure, and desperation for attention fuel this lowly process further. Reporters are invited on television by Tim Russert and Chris Matthews — and are promoted by Matt Drudge — if they are skilled in gossiping gleefully about the candidates, but not if they drone on about boring substantive policy matters or political corruption or lawbreaking scandals. Cheap gossip and vapid chatter thus become the primary currency of our coddled Beltway media stars.
And, perhaps most significantly of all, the pressures created by the GOP smear machine perfectly re-create the social dynamic of high school and college, where one can reap the rewards of being favored as the popular jock and cheerleader or relegated to the realm of the losers and nerds. It’s so much more fun and personally fulfilling to be liked and flattered by the triumphant War President — the “Commander-in-Chief” prancing around in “victory” on an aircraft carrier — while cackling at the weak, boring loser in the windsurfing tights, or the earnest nerd hilariously droning on about telecom amnesty and surveillance lawbreaking.
Perhaps more than anyone, Karl Rove exploited this sad social dynamic among reporters to keep them enthralled by his message machine. In a September 2007 column touting the genius of Rove, Gloria Borger of U.S. News & World Report unintentionally illustrated the GOP’s complete domination of the establishment media:
Karl Rove knew exactly what he was doing. In a round of interviews as he exited the White House, the man President Bush called the “architect” of his re-election was designing something else: a push for Hillary Clinton’s nomination. “I think she’s likely to be the nominee,” he told Rush Limbaugh. “And I think she’s fatally flawed.”All observations that, coming from anyone else, might be considered routine punditry. But when Rove speaks, the political class pays attention — usually with good reason.
The rest of Borger’s column is devoted to hailing the brilliance of Rove’s plot to induce Democrats to nominate Clinton because of how vulnerable a candidate she is. Beltway media mavens like Borger have spent the last seven years awash in true reverence for Karl Rove. Rove’s function, like all political operatives, is to manipulate the media, conceal information from them, and induce them to say what is politically beneficial to his boss, the President. In a world where political journalism performs its most basic functions, media manipulators like Rove are the natural enemy of journalists.
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