Political Winds

Enough already.  First they renamed National Airport “Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.”  The guy wasn’t even dead yet. Then they christened a ship the “USS Ronald Reagan.”  Last week California decided to remove one of the two statues it’s allowed in the US Capitol’s National Statuary Hall and replace it with a Reagan statue.  And now we have
Time’s silly cover with Reagan’s face and a tear on his cheek.  The Time article is about conservatives pining for the good old days of Reagan conservatism.  Except they weren’t good old days, as Paul Krugman correctly points out in today’s Times.  Many of today’s disasters are an extension of the Reagan legacy:  laissez-faire economics, regulatory oversight conducted by lobbyists and cronies, anti-environmentalism, attacks on civil liberties, you name it.  I will give Reagan this:  he wasn’t as bad as Bush.  Admittedly this isn’t saying much, but Reagan sometimes responded to changing circumstances.  He saw the opportunities presented by Gorbachev’s Soviet Union.  But Reagan didn’t end the cold war as the myth-makers would have you believe.

We’ve been through the drill many times. Ann Coulter says something outrageous and hateful. There are calls for conservative organizations to stop giving Coulter a platform. The vast majority of those pleas do not come from conservatives. Then a few weeks or months go by and Ann is back at it, sanctioned again by the conservative establishment.

This time it was Coulter using the word “faggot” referring to John Edwards in her speech on Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Then today it was revealed that Coulter’s Web site said Edwards campaign manager David Bonior “is fronting for Arab terrorists.”

People like Coulter give voice to the worst and often unexpressed sentiments of Republican politicians and their allied conservative organizations. What’s especially galling is that Republicans not only don’t hold Coulter accountable but they often suggest that the Democrats have their own extremists whom they use in the same way. Well, yes, there are extreme voices on the left. The difference, however, is that mainstream Democratic organizations and politicians don’t embrace those voices. Remember when Rush Limbaugh did his gruesome imitation of Michael J. Fox? Just days later, the president of the United States cozied up to Rush on his demagogic radio program. Ah, the Republicans say, you have Michael Moore. Sorry guys, to paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen, Michael Moore is no Ann Coulter. Nor is he Bill O’Reilly, Michael Savage, and all the others. Moore has a strong point of view and sometimes resorts to journalistic techniques that are arguably unfair. But he’s not a hate-mongerer. When it comes to lying and distortion, Moore isn’t in the league of the conservative propagandist/shock jock A-team.

It may seem perverse to suggest that, at the very moment the House of Representatives is repudiating his policy in Iraq, President Bush is poised for a political comeback. But don’t be astonished if that is the case… Bush now shows signs of renewed energy and is regaining the initiative on several fronts.

What is perverse is that the so-called dean of the Washington press corps could write such patent nonsense.  David Broder is supposed to be the guy who has covered it all, a sober-minded observer who calmly takes it all in and gives us the big picture.  Except that he doesn’t - and hasn’t for a long time.  My objection to Broder usually centers on his relentless advancement of mushy conventional wisdom.  This time he challenges CW but is so wildly off-base as to border on the bizarre.  Oh yeah, David Broder, Bush is on a roll.  As the New York Times’ Frank Rich summarizes,

Congressional votes against his war policy, the Libby trial, the Pentagon inspector general’s report deploring Douglas Feith’s fictional prewar intelligence, and the new and dire National Intelligence Estimate saying that America is sending troops into the cross-fire of a multifaceted sectarian cataclysm.

Imagine if Bush weren’t “regaining the initiative.”

The revisionists are very hard at work these days. There are legions of politicians and journalist-pundits who now generously admit they were wrong to support the war in 2003 and at the same rationalize that tragic choice. You know the drill - the intelligence was flawed, just about everyone thought Saddam was a threat, etc.

John Edwards - and I like the guy - made his own disingenuous mea culpa on Meet the Press last Sunday:

MR. RUSSERT: Why were you so wrong?
SEN. EDWARDS: For the same reason a lot of people were wrong. You know, we—the intelligence information that we got was wrong. I mean, tragically wrong.

And now Joe Klein, harsh critic of triangulators, is doing his own dance. He’s currently engaged in a brouhaha with Ariana Huffington about whether or not he was really for the war before he was against it. Ariana says Joe basically was for it, and Joe says no, he was only for it in one brief moment of weakness. And in his Time blog, in talking about John McCain, Joe asserts, “I disagreed with him about going to war in 2003… ” The evidence supports Ariana, who, among other things, points to Joe’s 2003 appearance on Meet the Press:

MR. KLEIN: …This is a really tough decision. War may well be the right decision at this point. In fact, I think it–it’s–it–it probably is.
RUSSERT: Now that’s twice you’ve said that: ‘It’s the right war.’ You believe it’s the wrong time. Why do you think it’s the right war?
KLEIN: Because sooner or later, this guy has to be taken out. Saddam has–Saddam Hussein has to be taken out.

So Mr. Anonymous is trying to be anonymous about his previous statements about the war. And, as Russert pointed out to Edwards, there were plenty of people in 2003 who were skeptical about the administration’s claims. One was an Illinois state senator named Barack Obama, whose judgment, said Russert, ” was on the money” when he made this statement in October of 2002:

I know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military is a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history. I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.

I would agree that YouTube’s airing of comments by other politicians, in particular, those of George Allen, had much more impact than those mentioned in the article. I would add that in some cases, this phenomenon is not merely the result of having a camera in the room where otherwise the comments would have gone unrecorded. Sometimes in fact, a reporter from the mainstream media might be present, but because of time or space restraints or indeed the lack of a good reportorial instinct, he or she doesn’t mention the sideshow or little detail that turns out to be a big deal. As a former reporter for CNN, I understand how that can happen. But one has only to remember the aforementioned Strom Thurmond’s birthday party. The media was there, but it was the blogging community that saw first that Trent Lott’s racist reference was a story. So “viral video” is simply the latest manifestation or tool of the user-generated content that is changing politics.

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