Letters to the Editor
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A Different Race
I get the feeling that the 2008 Presidential Race is between Hillary Clinton and the media.
Hellooo! Do your journalistic jobs and talk about the issues.
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I think you are missing something, Glenn
Hillary's crying Jag was but 18 hours before the polls. It was therefore impossible for this to be picked up by the tracking data.
She won by about 6,000 votes. She also had a much better machine than Obama. Obama also played to a younger crowd, and with everyone sensing she was dead in the water, I suspect a lot of that younger crowd opted to stay home and roll a fatty and watch cartoons rather than deal with the hassle of getting out to vote. There hasn't been one successful candidate who was able to parlay youth support into votes except for Eugene McCarthy, and he was only able to do that given there was a draft and the young boomers had skin in the game.
Political junkie that I am, I went up to a radio station broadcasting live during the day to live the election vicariously while waxing nostalgic about 1980. This thing wasn't called by anyone. It seems to have been a groundswell of support in the day in 24/7 instantaneous media coverage that had segments of the population (women, primarily) turn on a dime.
So what is the solution? If McCain/Feingold limits speech under the first amendment, how could we impose a poll data black out so many days before the primary?
The press thinks of itself as smarter than the rest of us. It is truly the fourth estate run amok. Blame it on Woodward and Bernstein opening up pandora's box by bringing down a presidency over a third rate break in. It broke once and for all the sense of respect the press held for the officials they covered.
I had a poly-sci professor blame it on the GI bill, saying before the press were usually ink stained high school grades who worked their way up the system, and now they were as educated as those they covered.
The velocity of information flows has drastically increased thanks (or no thanks) to the internet. There's no time to ponder as pundits bang on blogs seconds after events take place rather than sitting down and THINKING about what they are observing on our behalf. Clinton cries the afternoon before the polls open, and it is broadcast 24/7 thereafter. It was the dominate news story of the day while pundits ruminated over what was going to happen as a result of it.
Women took it as picking on the girl in part and others saw the crying jag as signs the woman was human, which was the big concern about her all along as she gets called cold, calculating, bitchy, and everything else.
The parallels to Reagan in 1980 astound me. The rap on him was being a detached reader of cue cards for his operators. Seizing the microphone in Nashua against my guy as I sat in the stands, he proved he was his own man and had a temper of sorts.
Reagan had lost to Bush in Iowa in an upset. Clinton lost to Obama in Iowa in an upset. Reagan reorganized his campaign staff and was deemed dead in the water. Hillary added an advisor and speculation was Carville was going to crawl out from under the bridge and troll the murky waters of partisan attack politics. Reagan dominated the news cycle from that saturday until the tuesday election and pulled an upset. Clinton dominated it for 18 hours and pulled an upset.
The only difference there is time. And the velocity of information flows between now and 1980 allows that occur in a much more compressed time frame today.
Reagan went on to steam roll Bush, with him dropping out after New Jersey in May after a late February primary. It's all been moved up, so Hillary could end this thing at the beginning of February.
Bush looked weak on that NH stage. Hell, he looked like a deer staring at an oncoming Peterbilt. Obama didn't necessarily do anything wrong, so maybe the parallel will not continue throughout the cycle.
But losing like that will sap the energy out of that campaign. Ring up a couple quick losses and the campaign bus can take on a gallows humor as it did on the Bush bus post NH.
History seems to be repeating itself Glenn, with the only difference being the time compression our instant electronic media provides to the process.
I am not so sure it is a good thing, and America has a real hard on when it comes to protecting the rights of the fourth estate, so it is not going to change.
Sadly, it is what it is.
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JSS
People can wean themselves from the glass teat if they actually want to.
I quit watching TV shortly after 9/11.. I found I was spending more time shouting at it than anything else.
Same thing with the radio. Now I burn MP3s on a rewritable CD and listen to music that way.. I gave up on radio after even the FM jocks starting touting right wing politics.
When I happen to catch TV now, I'm nauseated by the triviality and downright vacuousness of it.
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Only DFH's don't watch TV
Take your pablum like good little boys and girls!
HRH - I suggest Pacifica Radio, Amy Goodman and co put on a good news show between 7 and 8 am. It's streamed.
Otherwise, I agree with your choices.
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Radio Paradise is also streamed
And plays a pretty good selection of all music all the time. You can also check out a map of where all the listeners are in real time.
And no political chat at all.
Of course, if the new royalty scheme (designed to kill internet radio) is put in place, pretty much all streamed music radio will vanish or go pirate.
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Bill Timberman
@ 11:01 post.
I believe you are more right than you could ever imagine.
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No Chris is wrong, and you are wrong too, Glenn
The press all over the various inflections of the 'free world' is partisan and vitriolic. In meddy old England the papers and their flacks and shills are openly violently partisan, the point of absurdity. And their governance really doesn't appear to suffer for it. The same thing is true in Italy, France, South Africa, Israel, Australia.
No the problem is not that the press is weak and stupid, whether it is or not. The problem is that the populace is weak and stupid and will believe pretty much whatever you tell them until the next fat screaming head tells them something different.
It's entirely reasonable for the press to take sides, even crazy partisan off the chart lunatic sides. And we've known for years that the media, is 'right wing' over here or 'left wing' over there or something else somewhere else. We know this. It's not even intuitive, it's in the open. The problem is YOUR expectation that some hunkering suit on MSCNNFOXBC is 'above' that.
Which of course is pollyana stupidity and vanity on your part I think. Oh it's on the tube, it must be fair statecraft in the mode of Pericles. I'm sure of it.
Otherwise you, Chris and you, Glenn need to give me the exact date that the Era of William Randolph Hearst came to an end and media suddenly became a pure unblemished truth.
I say let the media play to the cheap seats let the cable news gnash their teeth and proclaim "X" is the New Buddha Black Jesus and "Y" has sex with decapitated babies while smoking crack with Charlie Manson in hell. That's fine by me that's what playing to the cheap seats is.
But you need to know if you're one of the fools sitting in the cheap seats. You need to look around. If Americans can't or won't think critically then it doesn't matter either way.
Chris Matthews is an asshole and a fool. And Saint high and mighty Keith Olbermann was almost as gleeful at the prospect of Hillary being drug off in a trundle cart to the guillotine, for what it's worth. So there are no heroes here. None of them.
But you're the guy yelling at them for US being duped by it. You're yelling at the wrong people. It's the electorate who's clueless indifferent and dull, easy molded to do and say what you need, when you need it. If Chris Matthews said a lawn Gnome was a better candidate than Hillary then there would people saying we need vote one in. I swear if my beagle could talk she could vote smarter than some Americans.