You want to be an informed citizen – that’s what you’re supposed to be, and what everyone talking about the current three-person run for the White House says they are. They may be dismissive of Hillary Clinton, or Barack Obama or John McCain, but they will tell you their scorn is well-founded – they know what they’re talking about.
Maybe they do, but most opinion is developed with help. Some watch Keith Olbermann faithfully, others Bill O’Reilly; some listen to talk radio, to Rush Limbaugh or Air America. Whether that forms their opinions or simply reinforces what they themselves already think is unknowable – but assuming they know just what they think and that these sources simply provide reinforcing facts and pithy phrases they can drop into arguments at the water coolor or at the local bar, or wherever one discusses what’s wrong and just who can fix it, is not a good assumption. Everyone’s life is busy. Only wonks with far too much time on their hands read position papers while flipping back and forth as C-Span provides live coverage from the House and Senate, and then review the speeches candidates make, follow the statistical analysis of the most recent polling, and then carefully follow statements from campaign managers. That’s madness – best to watch Chris Matthews blither and try to hide his crush on John McCain or be entertained by Olbermann, or outraged by O’Reilly or Hannity over at Fox News. Or John Stewart and Steven Colbert can do your work for you, or every Friday night on HBO, Bill Maher.
Those who still retain the ability to wade through nine hundred words of prose might read op-ed pieces in the newspaper, although most columnists know few can manage even that these days and are glad to chat on the cable news shows or PBS, winnowing their short column down into a few verbal flourishes. That works too. With luck they’ll get booked on the Charlie Rose Show on PBS and get to say much more – but that runs late at night against Letterman and Leno and few people watch, and many just sleep. Oh well – you do what you can.
Still, columnists are influential. And newspapers hire the best they can, or in smaller markets, buy the syndicated rights to plop the important column in the local rag. The New York Times has Nicholas Kristof – political scientist, author, and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist specializing in East Asia. He’d been Bureau Chief in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Tokyo and has those books – China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power (1994) and Thunder from the East: Portrait of a Rising Asia (2000). And there was Japanese Economy at the Millennium (1999). He knows things. In 1990 he won a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his reporting on The Tiananmen Square stuff, and all his work on why it happened. He reports on pollution and human rights and has been on fire about the Darfur conflict in Sudan. As for Joseph Wilson and the reliability of documents claiming that Iraq had tried to obtain uranium from Niger, he broke the story before Wilson wrote his op-ed piece that ticked off the vice president and caused all the trouble. Back in 2000 his Two Cheers for Sweatshops: They’re dirty and dangerous. They’re also a major reason Asia is back on track was a bit odd, but he had a point.
So Kristof has his regular columns in the Times now – but there is a danger in giving the Big Gun that platform as an opinion-maker, if that is what influential columnists are. You’re a busy person; the man is good and will do your work for you, what they call the heavy lifting, so you read him. He knows the Far East, he’s the go-to guy on Darfur – but what does he know about anything else? Sunday, February 17, 2008, he gave us this piece, trying to capture a domestic phenomenon, the all but certain nomination of John McCain for president by the Republicans, in spite of the obvious fact that party establishment loathes the guy and Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter are apoplectic with the guy’s winning primary after primary, locking it up if you do the math. He decides to tackle how this could be. He wants to explain it all. That’s what he does.
In the process he tries to put his finger on just what people want:
Even for those of us who shudder at many of John McCain’s positions, there is something refreshing about a man who wins so many votes despite a major political shortcoming: he is abysmal at pandering.
What sets Senator McCain apart isn’t so much his physical courage in Vietnam; many of his fellow prisoners also showed immense bravery under torture. But the United States Congress tends to be a courage-free zone, so Mr. McCain’s orneriness toward Republican primary voters makes him a lionheart in the political world.
That’s the thesis, but Steve Benen here wonders if Kristof is kidding – he had to read the item several times, saying he realizes the “media adulation for John McCain is often embarrassing, even to the point of sycophancy,” but this is nonsense:
As far as Kristof is concerned, McCain deserves praise for two character traits, which happen to contradict themselves: 1) McCain doesn’t pander; and 2) McCain does pander, but he’s bad at it.
It’s the examples Kristof uses, like torture:
There was nary a vote in the Republican primary to be gained by opposing the waterboarding of swarthy Muslim men accused of terrorism. But Mr. McCain led the battle against Dick Cheney on torture, even though it cost him donations, votes and endorsements.
Even more than his time as a prisoner in Hanoi, that marked Mr. McCain’s most heroic moment. He risked his political career to protect Muslim terror suspects who constitute the most despised and voiceless people in America.
Yeah, McCain took a firm, unpopular stand on torture, and then abandoned his position on torture. He’s in need of party approval.
Kristol adds this:
Then there’s immigration. While other Republican candidates revved up the mobs by debating how high a limb is optimal for hanging illegal immigrants, he patiently explained that it’s a complex problem with unsatisfying solutions, including creation of a path to citizenship for illegals.
He dropped that too. And there’s this:
For years, Mr. McCain denounced ethanol subsidies, which exist mostly because every ambitious politician in America wants to win the Iowa caucuses someday. This year he claimed that he liked ethanol after all, but he was so manifestly insincere and incompetent in this pandering that the episode was less contemptible than amusing.
Wait. Kristof is saying McCain is popular because he decided to pander to the corn crowd, but as he was “insincere and incompetent” about it, you have to admire that. You do? Yep:
Granted, his pride in “straight talk” may arise partly because he is an execrable actor. When he does try double-talk, he looks so guilty and uncomfortable that he convinces nobody.
Benen argues this in NOT a good thing:
When a politician shamelessly panders and flip-flops to make right-wing activists happy, it’s not worthy of praise. When a politician routinely abandons principles to curry favor with his far-right base, it’s not worthy of praise.
When a politician is so clumsy about it that they look ridiculous, it’s definitely worthy of praise.
But there you have it. Those who turn to others to do the heavy lifting, to work out what’s what, can now stand around the water cooler and say they’re for McCain because McCain quickly changes his deeply-held convictions when he is told he must, and then defends his new deeply-held convictions really badly.
Richard Einhorn, on the other hand, here hones in on this Kristof gem:
In short, Mr. McCain truly has principles that he bends or breaks out of desperation and with distaste. That’s preferable to politicians who are congenital invertebrates.
It is? Einhorn says this is a “dangerous (because it is so often believed), ad hominem fallacy.” We should know better by now:
How anyone after George W. Bush could conceivably defend something so idiotic is truly beyond me. Let’s grant - just for a moment, I promise - that Kristof’s dichotomy is true, namely that the world divides neatly between politicians with nothing but principles and politicians with none. Then it’s quite clear that principles don’t matter in the slightest. What really matters is judgment. Clarence Thomas has principles, fer crissakes. That doesn’t mean I want him anywhere near a position of influence in my government. In most instances (we all know the exceptions) I would far, far prefer an agonized Hamlet on the Supreme Court who decides the cases on their merit, not by recourse to a pre-existing ideology stuffed to the gizzard with principles on what the law “should” be or “is.”
But the world doesn’t divide as neatly as Kristof says it does. No one, even Tom Delay, is bereft of principles (death to insects! was the last thing many a Texan termite heard). And anyone, even our greatest leaders can be portrayed as spineless. Try parsing Lincoln’s positions on slavery and race sometime. Chase was (one of) the genuinely principled abolitionists in the cabinet, not Honest Abe. He even said that if he could preserve the union by keeping slavery, he would keep slavery (yes, I know, Lincoln’s a wily one and what he said has many interpretations, but I can’t imagine Chase saying anything remotely like that: his principles wouldn’t allow Lincoln’s nuanced, or if you prefer, unprincipled attitude towards individual freedom versus restoring a potentially fragile political union).
So is McCain, as Kristof would have it, “a rare politician with the courage not just to follow the crowd but also to lead it?” Kristof says it really is “refreshing” to see “that courage” rewarded by voters.
Einhorn is on the case:
Has Kristof not read his Brothers Grimm, or Andrew Lang’s fairy tale books? How many stories do you think there are in Western cultures warning against the Pied Piper, or being a lemming? Hundreds, perhaps? Thousands? And how about American history? Remember George Armstrong Custer? Or even Lyndie England’s creepy boyfriend? Or, duh! How about one George W. Bush, Crawford’s own Churchill and nemesis to Evil Ones - or at least all the bass in his cement pond?
Einhorn suggests that political leaders might better have something one calls judgment. Gaming the race leads nowhere:
America doesn’t need merely anyone who can lead. They need someone who can make rational decisions about how to clean up the massive, stinking problems the Bush administration has deposited all over this country and the world. Based upon his record, his character, and his statements, in no way is John McCain that person - I can’t forget that nutty stroll in Baghdad, for example. Oh, I’ll concede that John McCain is a more rational and sensible person than Michael Huckabee. That qualifies McCain to run for the post of county dogcatcher (but not necessarily to win). That certainly does not make John McCain presidential material.
But what is said in the Times becomes water cooler talk and conventional wisdom. It is what Kristof says of Obama:
It’s also striking that Barack Obama is leading a Democratic field in which he has been the candidate who is least-scripted and most willing to annoy primary voters, whether in speaking about Reagan’s impact on history or on the suffering of Palestinians.
Has Barack Obama ever taken a stand against the prevailing winds within his own party on a substantive political issue (saying you have friends in red states does not count)? Granted, Obama’s political career is a mere shadow next to John McCain’s decades of experience, but there is still plenty of time for him to have opposed the entrenched thinking of his party on something. Obama never “annoys” primary voters (and, for the record, speaking of the “suffering of Palestinians” hardly “annoys” Democratic primary voters; it delights them); in fact, he does the opposite.
And the Democrats have their own McCain:
Hillary Clinton, if anyone, is the candidate who continually “annoys” primary voters with her refusal to apologize for her Iraq vote. Obama never offers McCain’s occasional and necessary bitter pill. Obama is, in fact, his party’s candy dispenser. And as for Kristof’s contention that Obama is the “least-scripted” candidate, what distinguishes Obama is that he is the most scripted candidate in recent political history, a candidate whose virtues seem to stem entirely from the speeches he delivers and the rhetorical style with which he delivers them. Indeed, when speaking without a script, he somehow loses his magical aura.
So then, all conventional wisdom is a crock, and no one has time to do their own research.
What to make of this all? You’re on your own, and take what you see, hear and read with a grain of salt, or many. And the next time someone tells you they are behind Hillary Clinton, or Barack Obama or John McCain, and lays out their reasoning, try not to roll you eyes and be all rude. As the old saying goes, consider the source.
