Whatever those of us who must live through it may think, future historians will love the Presidential election of 2008, the story of which reads like an Allen Drury novel without the understatement and restraint. Only a full-time blogger can really keep up, but I’ll take advantage of a quiet Friday evening to make a few observations on the latest developments.
According to polls, most of the public thinks that the media are working for an Obama victory. That is a majority of Americans-in-the-street, not readers of Instapundit and NRO Online. As if to prove the vox populi right, Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post promptly declared that journalists are “mad” at the McCain campaign, supposedly because its ads are so much worse than any before in electoral history. Well, that’s a matter of perception, and we can judge the quality of Mr. Kurtz’s current perceptions from his endorsement of the truncated quotation (about whether the war in Iraq is a “task from God”) that ABC’s Charlie Gibson deployed last night to attack the GOP Vice Presidential candidate. It takes deep-rooted partisan determination to turn a prayer “that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending them [U.S. troops] out on a task that is from God” into a declaration that God is on our side. Given that Howard Kurtz enjoys a reputation of being “fair and balanced” by MSM standards, I think that we can say unequivocally that the debate about “media bias” is over.
Obviously, conservatives would prefer that the Left not have so formidable a propaganda juggernaut at its disposal. Nonetheless, no right-winger has proposed doing anything about it beyond drawing attention to its existence. A fair number of leftists, outraged by their adversaries’ tiny breaches in the media barricades, have demanded that the government emasculate Fox News and talk radio. The contrast tells much about which side of the political spectrum is the side of liberty.
The best way to deal with media partisanship is, paradoxically, to encourage it. The First Amendment guarantees the right of the New York Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC et al. to give full-throated backing to the candidates of their choice and to denigrate Republicans to any extent short of libel (which means, per New York Times v. Sullivan, to any extent at all). They should be proud of their freedom. If they aren’t, we should be proud of it for them, while reserving the right to mock absurd distortions. Honesty is the best policy, and a brazenly opinionated press (which is what our country has had for most of its history) is better for everybody than one that covers up its ideological one-sidedness.
An odd reaction to the Palin interview, shared by Jonah Goldberg and David Frum, is that the candidate should have answered less straightforwardly. David goes so far as to call her “under-informed and over-confident” because she didn’t bob and weave. Now, maybe Jonah is right that “the responsible thing” is to “use code phrases to dodge offering firm answers” on foreign policy questions. If so, Governor Palin certainly said nothing a tenth as provocative as Barack Obama’s threat to make military incursions into Pakistan. (The New York Times has now reported, truly or otherwise, that incursions are our policy, drawing predictable (though doubtless impotent) ire from the Pakistani army.) Governor Palin also didn’t strike me as “under-informed”. Unlike her questioner, she knew that the “Bush Doctrine” is a cloudy concept, and she accurately denied that Georgian membership in NATO would automatically commit the U.S. to going to war in that country’s behalf. If she blundered elsewhere, the media charitably kept silent. To my mind, her willingness to answer hostile questions directly is a good sign, and the fact that her answers were sensibly conservative is a better one.
If I needed a reason not to vote for Barack Obama, he gave me one yesterday when he announced that one of the objectives of his vision of “hope and change” is to “make government cool again”. One doesn’t have to be an adamantine libertarian – and I’m not – to shudder at that phrase. Whether the government does a little or a lot, it should be looked on as an instrument for carrying out limited purposes – and one that needs to be watched closely to prevent the misuse of its powers – not as an object of sentimental devotion elevated above the rest of society. It’s obvious that Slick Barry hasn’t spent his spare time reading Liberal Fascism.
And if I need a reason to wonder about the competence of The One’s staff work, I’ll look no further than his new ad criticizing John McCain for not using a computer or e-mail. It’s a silly criterion for evaluating a candidate. Those are tools, not credentials. (In fact, no President yet has made any significant use of e-mail while in office.) In any event, a campaign team with half a wit among them might have wondered, before shooting the commercial, whether there might be some reason for a guy who suffered visible damage to his arms not being adept at pecking on a keyboard. They might even have done elementary research; it’s not as if John McCain’s life is a closed book. It turns out that he’s physically unable to type.
What I find most telling about this incident is that Senator McCain himself stated earlier this year that he isn’t e-mail savvy but did not mention the reason. Skipping the chance to elicit sympathy is more admirable than it would be for him to have the world’s greatest blog.
Finally, the most amazing political event of the week is the apparent recovery of Republican prospects in the Congressional elections. No one predicted this upswing, and it may turn out to be a bubble. Assuming, however, that it’s a real phenomenon, it may be less a “Palin Effect” than an abrupt reversion to the mean.
The Republican calamity in 2006 resulted from a relatively small shift in votes. Polling gives such grainy pictures that we don’t know for sure what that shift represented. One view is that Americans as a whole have moved to the Left. An alternative explanation is that the least attached Republican voters dropped away, disheartened by the travails of the War on Terror, the constant fingernail scraping of liberal pundits and GOP politicians’ less than firm adherence to their professed principles.
If the second hypothesis is correct, the addition to the ticket of Governor Palin – best known for fighting against Republican corruptionists – reminded voters who had drifted away from the party what they liked about it. Senator McCain couldn’t successfully woo them on his own, owing to his record of hostility toward the Right, topped, of course, by the McCain-Feingold Act. But now he looks like a genuinely independent thinker rather than a man who pokes conservatives in the eye for fun, and the Republican Party looks much less like the party of pork and spending than it did a couple of weeks ago. Under those circumstances, much of the internecine hostility of the past two years seems to have faded, and the waverers are again taking heart. If they remain in that mood, this election may look more like 2002 than 2006.
This has been an optimistic post, so it must conclude with the standard caveats: A week is a long time in politics. One swallow does not make a summer. Don’t count your chickens before they hatch. Well, you know the litany. Much can go wrong between now and the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. On the other hand, much can continue to go right. Whatever the direction, more strangeness is bound to come.
Addendum: Oh, my! Instapundit points to a Forbes article from way back in 2000 detailing Senator McCain’s path-breaking use of the Internet during his first Presidential campaign and calling him “the U.S. Senate’s savviest technologist”. Could the “aw, shucks” stuff about computer illiteracy have been a devious ploy to lure Slick Barry into an embarrassing blunder? Maybe the old coot ain’t so addled after all.