Read the whole piece here.OpinionJournal - Wonder Land: ...Have you ever noticed how on a scale of one to 10, every untoward event in the life of the Bush presidency goes straight to a 10?[on the lamestream media scale]
The Abu Ghraib photos? A 10 forever. Dick Cheney catching a hunting buddy with some birdshot? An instant 10. The Bush National Guard story? Total 10. How can it be that each downside event in this presidency greets the public at this one, screeching level of outrage and denunciation by the out-of-power party and a perpetually outraged media?
There was a time when what's been called news judgment would deem some stories a five or six and run them on page 14, or deeper in the newscast. Back then the Senate minority leader wouldn't bother to look up from his desk. Not with this presidency. Every downside event--large, small, in between--plays above the fold on the front page now. And when Dick Cheney accidentally pops Harry Whittington, old Harry Reid jumps up from his Senate leader's desk faster than a Nevada jack rabbit to announce, one more time, that this "is part of the secretive nature of this administration."
Here are some of the political and media bonfires that have been lit on the White House lawn, stoked and reignited the past five years: the "stolen" 2000 election, Halliburton, "Fahrenheit 9/11," Cheney lives in an "undisclosed location," Abu Ghraib, torture at Guantanamo, Bush lied about WMD, secret CIA prison sites, Valerie Plame, the neocons, Rumsfeld, Cheney's "secret" energy task force, Cindy Sheehan, Bush is destroying Social Security, Hurricane Katrina, Jack Abramoff, illegal wiretaps, Bill Frist's stock sales, what else?
Absent any fresh or positive message for voters, why not try winning by turning politics under the Republicans into an experience of unrelenting discomfort? The substance of any given issue falls in importance. Connecting Jack Abramoff to George Bush personally was always a stretch. So what?
The most telling evidence of a strategy of discomfiting the body politic was the January bonfire over terrorist wiretaps. Here the opposition shrieked for days about a 'constitutional crisis' even as polls were indicating public support for the Bush program, including 28% who would OK tapping anyone's phone 'on a regular basis' to catch terrorists.
Parties don't sail against the polling winds. Why this time? Because come November, the 'wiretaps' will sit in many voters' minds not as a debate over Article II but as part of what feels to them like endless 'bad news.' The press's supersizing of the Cheney shooting may look like excess. So what? No matter how voters feel on any one issue--terror, the courts, values--the Democrats, event after event, are building the feeling that the Bush-Cheney presidency and GOP Congress have somehow been 40 miles of bad road.
Can it work? Absent a 21st-century political vision, I think Democratic candidates will always be drawing to an inside straight. Creating a negative aura is easier than contending on discrete issues such as taxes. Yes, substance and ideas count in politics, but in many parts of American culture these days feelings and stereotypes are money. Why not make the public just want to throw in the towel on the Republican 'experience'?
Until the recent strong speeches by the president and other officials, the White House had no apparent strategy for offsetting this almost daily downdraft of ill political winds. Not that the antidote is obvious. The talk shows and blogs? Arguably, they fan the flames higher; most of their energies are spent pouring gasoline on the other guys' bonfires. Sure, some people like the new high heat of our politics. But you know what? Some--many--don't.
Those interested in a more complete analysis of political polarization in the U.S. today should read "How Divided Are We?" by James Q. Wilson in the February issue of Commentary, reprinted in this Wednesday's OpinionJournal.com (click here). But collaborating with a willing media to market the opposition party as a haunted house is a cynical, wholly reductionist strategy, with nothing in it for the public good. It dumbs down our politics. As shown with Social Security reform, the system ceases to function. A major U.S. foreign-policy initiative like the Bush Doctrine has to be delegitimized with no serious opposition support at any level. This is the strategy of the phalanx, not politics. If it works, the other side will surely run the same tar-and-pitch strategy against a new Clinton presidency. It deserves to fail.
Winston Chuchill, the savior of wartime Britain said "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat."
And in this time of war, what do the Democrats offer? Nothing but negativity! What a disgrace!
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