I’ve been amused by the right wing campaign to vilify the now stodgy NY Times for its "treasonous" act of disclosing the Bush administration’s secret bank records monitoring program. "We’re in a war against terrorists, goddam it. How dare the NY Times undermine the war effort," goes this line of thinking. Since terrorists will be with us until the end of time, this war is by definition without end, and so therefore will the President and his cronies be ever able to invoke national security to cover their crimes.
So any time your opponent shows a little fight, attack him viciously to keep him on the defensive. It’s a strategy akin to swiftboating. There’s no substance to the accusations; it’s simply a tactic to divert attention from the real issue and to make the NY Times think twice before it ever discloses information harmful to the administration again. It’s also, I’m sure, an appeal to the factions within the NY Times that are concerned only to cover the grey lady’s corporate backside.
Speaking about keeping the media in line, I thought it might be interesting to refer readers here to The Daily Howler’s retrospective of the first debate between Bush and Gore in October of 2000. The Howler does a very good job of amassing evidence to show how the Courtier Class echo chamber works to legitimate what’s absurd and to delegitimate what is sensible in shaping public thinking. In this case of the first debate, there was a very concerted effort to legitimate Bush’s cluelessness and inability to grasp the issues and to delegitimate Gore for being sharp and knowledgeable.
The first debate pundit meme was that Bush won the debate because he didn’t embarrass himself. The Howler asks the obvious question: Who sets this low standard except the Courtier Class itself. It was a rigged game for the start, set up in such a way as to make it virtually impossible for Bush to lose unless he came across as a drooling Neanderthal.
Bush won, according to the pundits, despite polling that showed that Americans gave the debate to Gore by almost ten percentage points. The pundits said over and over again the Gore won on points, but dismissed that as a technicality. Bush really won because, well, they wanted him to. How else can you explain the absurd low-expectations criterion? They could just have easily focussed on how out of his depth he was (and has proven himself since to be). It was a remarkable bit of groupthink which seemed a willful refusal to see what was plainly there for all to see.
On page one of the San Diego Union-Tribune, for example, George Condon quoted Texas professor Bruce Buchanan. “Given expectations, I think Bush comes off a little better because I don’t think he was smashed,” Buchanan had said. The professor’s logic was bizarre on its face, but Michael Kramer matched it in the New York Daily News. Kramer said that Bush was “the winner,” offering this as part of his logic: “Bush, although clearly less knowledgeable on most issues…spoke in a soothing, conversational tone that helped answer lingering doubts about his ability to be president.” Was Bush being held to “a very low standard?” To Kramer, Bush countered doubts about his qualifications by speaking in a conversational tone! Bush had been “clearly less knowledgeable”— but soothing! But then, oddball judgments of this type were found all over the press.
Indeed, many papers expressed a strange equivalence, in which Gore’s superior “command of the issues” was matched by the way Bush had topped that low bar. Consider the lead editorial in the Charlotte Observer. “Certainly Mr. Gore dominated the event,” the paper wrote. “While the vice president’s command of a wide range of issues was impressive, Mr. Bush at times seemed timid and unfocused, unable to pursue discussions of some issues beyond a couple of key points.” But so what? “Expectations for Mr. Bush were low from the outset,” the paper explained, “and to many viewers he exceeded them.” The paper never explained a key point; it never explained how it knew, just hours post-debate, that viewers thought Bush had exceeded expectations. But many other major newspapers engaged in this mind-reading act. They told their readers what viewers had thought; they downplayed what viewers had said in those polls; and then they expressed the odd equivalence expressed by the Observer. Had Gore been “impressive” and Bush “unfocused?” Was Bush “unable to pursue discussions?” In the end, it didn’t matter, because Bush had surpassed his low bar.
Read the whole post here. The key thing the Howler tries to point out is that this low expectations meme was a pudit-originated criterion that, consciously or unconsciously, had the effect of branding Gore a loser when by any sane criterion he was clearly the winner.
Leave a Reply