Who sucked all the Positivity out of the Democratic Party?
By LisaB on September 7, 2008 at 6:20 PM in Barack Obama, Current Affairs, McCain/Palin 2008, Media Bias, Media Handling of Story, Sarah Palin
There are some interesting articles out there about the general tenor of the campaign now that both conventions have been held and the real GE campaign has begun. Like many Democrats, I’ve been appalled by the negativity, both in tone and tactics, from my own party this year. I’m used to condemning Republican tactics, but I’ve found my own party acting reprehensibly this year.
So, it’s interesting to see what others say about the overall race.
TimesOnline – London has an article about why McCain is not out of the running.
For middle America it is not a joke to hunt moose, it is not kooky to believe in biblical truth and the phrase “Hockey Mom” needs no translation. . . . Sarah Palin, beauty queen, sports reporter and mom of five, may fascinate in Europe, but she inspires in America.
Read the rest ->
As does John McCain. From the beginning of the presidential campaign the appeal of this authentic American hero has been underestimated. He has proven that his rebel streak, his independence and his maverick spirit strike a real chord with voters. He has been underestimated and he should not be.
————-The practices of America’s politicians and the preferences of its people are sometimes difficult for foreigners to follow. But only by trying to do so can this presidential election be understood.
It is often suggested that the biggest political danger to Barack Obama is race. It isn’t. Class is far more dangerous. The American Right has, for 40 years now, surfed a tide of anger against elites and the feeling that “they” in Washington don’t get “us” here in the real America.
I agree class is the bigger problem here. But the Obama campaign deliberately chooses to frame the class problem as a racial one. The fact that a Hawaiian who attended Columbia and Harvard thinks he can play himself as just another beset upon guy from the ‘hood is ridiculous on the face of it. However, calling people who don’t buy that fiction “racist” is galling.
Add that to a party deliberately choosing to use a caucus system where the voices of a few outweigh the many to get a certain kind of candidate and a candidate willing to bus people in to game the caucases, and you’ve got a recipe for elitism. Both the party and the candidate reflect elitist themes now.
But the Times piece also echoes an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about Sarah Palin.
There is a frustration extant in this country. It’s the frustration that, while we play by the rules and manage, as a family, the routines of life, Washington betrays us. Betrays us in the sense that we are made strangers from our government. We can’t make it be responsible. We can’t make it reform. We can’t make it understand — we can’t make them, the celebrities and insiders, the important people, understand.
That’s what’s most refreshing about Palin. She is one of us. Her family is the one where the rain falls and the faucet drips and, no matter what, the family deals with it. These families go to work every day, send their sons and daughters off to fight the country’s wars, nurse their children through crisis, and walk proudly together to face the troubles that come their way.
The general perception is Palin isn’t wearing a false face. While her life may be messy and complicated (whose isn’t?), she isn’t just posing behind a gun or standing on a fishing boat for the photo op. From everything we’ve seen so far, Palin’s life has been a good one, but not a particularly privileged one. She made the most of her opportunities.
Obama benefitted from an ivy-league education (Columbia, Harvard) and powerful friends to rocket to the top of American politics. Yet we know as little about his school years, family and friends as the campaign can keep hidden, with details only coming out because they’ve been dug out with great difficulty. We’ve still not seen health, undergraduate, law school records, state senate records or material and papers written by Obama. And there’s those Chicago Annenberg papers. . .
The Guardian (the Observer) has an interesting article on what it sees as unproductive hate from the left. Here at NQ, we’ve been writing about this very topic since it first appeared during the primary race. As long-time Democrats who initially felt excited about our party’s prospects, I won’t be overstating it to say we’ve been absolutely stunned by the turn “our” party has taken this year.
Stunned and still perplexed might be more accurate. At least for me. And others have done the unthinkable: some have decided to campaign for arch-enemy Republicans. Luckily, John McCain isn’t a recent version of a “typical” Republican.
But still.
My colleagues in the American liberal press had little to fear at the start of the week. Their charismatic candidate was ahead in virtually every poll. George W Bush was so unpopular that conservatives were scrambling around for reasons not to invite the Republican President to the Republican convention. Democrats had only to maintain their composure and the White House would be theirs. During the 1997 British general election, the late Lord Jenkins said that Tony Blair was like a man walking down a shiny corridor carrying a precious vase. He was the favourite and held his fate in his hands. If he could just reach the end of the hall without a slip, a Labour victory was assured. The same could have been said of the American Democrats last week. But instead of protecting their precious advantage, they succumbed to a spasm of hatred and threw the vase, the crockery, the cutlery and the kitchen sink at an obscure politician from Alaska.
But instead of following a measured strategy, they went berserk. On the one hand, the media treated her as a sex object. The New York Times led the way in painting Palin as a glamour-puss in go-go boots you were more likely to find in an Anchorage lap-dancing club than the Alaska governor’s office.
On the other, liberal journalists turned her family into an object of sexual disgust: inbred rednecks who had stumbled out of Deliverance. Palin was meant to be pretending that a handicapped baby girl was her child when really it was her wanton teenage daughter’s. When that turned out to be a lie, the media replaced it with prurient coverage of her teenage daughter, who was, after all, pregnant, even though her mother was not going to do a quick handover at the maternity ward and act as if the child was hers.
Hatred is the most powerful emotion in politics. At present, American liberals are not fighting for an Obama presidency. I suspect that most have only the haziest idea of what it would mean for their country. The slogans that move their hearts and stir their souls are directed against their enemies: Bush, the neo-cons, the religious right.
————When a hate campaign goes wrong, however, disaster follows. And everything that could go wrong with the campaign against Palin did. American liberals forgot that the public did not know her. By the time she spoke at the Republican convention, journalists had so lowered expectations that a run-of-the-mill speech would have been enough to win the evening.
——————-Journalists who believe in women’s equality should not spread sexual smears about a candidate, or snigger at her teenage daughter’s pregnancy, or declare that a mother with a young family cannot hold down a responsible job for the pragmatic reason that they will look like gross hypocrites if they do. Before Palin, we saw hypocrisy of the right when shock jocks who had spent years denouncing feminism came over all politically correct when Bill Clinton had an affair with Monica Lewinsky.
——————–In an age when politics is choreographed, voters watch out for the moments when the public-relations facade breaks down and venom pours through the cracks. Their judgment is rarely favourable when it does. Barack Obama knows it. All last week, he was warning American liberals to stay away from the Palin family. He understands better than his supporters that it is not a politician’s enemies who lose elections, but his friends.
The only thing I would quibble over here is the statement that Obama knows a hate campaign won’t work. As the, at least, nominal head of his own campaign, Obama could have “stopped the hate” months ago when Bill and Hillary Clinton were labeled racists. He didn’t. That he chooses to appear worried about this now means there’s a percentage in it for him at this point. And the fact that his surrogates continue to attack in unacceptable ways suggests he’s not serious anyway; he’s just trying to appear above such tactics. And he’s blaming his staff.
NPR aired a piece about the current state of the race and Sarah Palin’s place in it. Along with other points, some favorable and some not, the piece had this:
Never underestimate the voters’ dislike of the press. For many voters, Palin will gain visceral sympathy simply because the press is feeding on her. If we don’t devour her, she will emerge with more intangible support than the press can even imagine. That is exactly what happened to Quayle after a famous surround-and-snarl press conference in his hometown of Huntington, Ind., days after the 1988 convention.
Reporters tend to condemn the Republicans’ ability to use press antipathy as a dirty and scurrilous trick. It is no such thing. It is as sensible and legitimate to rage against the press as it is against big pharmaceuticals, tobacco, doctors or lawyers. Bill Clinton used it to great effect.
Bottom line: If the press and pundits instantly and unanimously pooh-pooh Sarah Palin, she must be doing something right. That’s how a lot of voters see things.
I’ve been completely mystified by “the media” this year. Unequal vetting of candidates (Palin, Obama), partisan behavior (MSNBC), planted stories reported as “news” (fake baby story) and unsupported opinion (Dowd, Herbert) make for a lean toward the Democrats this year. While the Republicans have their backers (WSJ, Kristol, the always loathsome Rush), these are well known and not unexpected.
So, while one can get lost in the “weeds” of Bristol’s baby, Obama’s position on drilling for oil, McCain’s use of his POW status and Joe Biden’s gaffe machine, it is useful to see what is generally going on. Right now, the Democrats are driving the show, but unfortunately, this group of Democrats are death-eaters, sowing negativity, bad feelings and division wherever they go. Not content with destroying their own party, I cannot imagine how they would govern.
That’s a far cry from the Obama = lightworker theme of just a few months ago.
And it’s even further away from my own excitement at having two break-through candidates less than a year ago. Obama lost my vote. Now I just have to decide what to do with it.
by Ronald Scott
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