January 13, 2004
Lazy Media Habits Die Hard
Posted by nerdling | January 13, 2004 03:06 PM
I feel that, as a citizen, I should make at least a slight effort to stay abreast of world events as well as domestic ones. I don't do the best job of it, but particularly in years when there is a presidential election underfoot, I try to follow people and issues. If you've read anything I've written it's probably clear that I am not a Republican but neither am I a Democrat. Political parties are, in my admittedly narrow view, a necessary evil that I can neither summon enough interest to beat the drum for nor ignore completely. In general I think the Big Two are the same parties with different coffers—the coffers being the bottom line on both sides.
Regardless of those leanings, if my only choices for President are a Republican and a Democrat (because, honestly, they really are my only choices), I have to go Democrat, else I could not face myself in the mirror every morning. That said, I have no real particular favorites—a politician is a politician is a politician, be you Stalin, Reagan or Mao—but my preferences lie in Dean or Clark. Chances are Dean will be the one to try and uproot Bush.
Hey, I'm honest. I can be idealistic but I don't have many illusions about politics. Dean is probably not going to be that much better even if he does win. Anything is better than Bush but there are some things that will never change and the political establishment is one of those things. Say one thing, mean another. Point with one hand to distract from what the other hand is doing. Blah, blah, blah.
Despite that, however, I found this little tidbit from salon.com entertaining:
New York Times columnist David Brooks recently ridiculed Dean for beginning "a sentence with, 'Us rural people ...' Dean grew up on Park Avenue and in East Hampton. If he's a rural person, I'm the Queen of Sheba." Somebody might want to tell Brooks (or his editor) that Dean has spent half his life living in Vermont, and his wife still practices family medicine in the tiny town of Shelburne (pop: 6,618). Meanwhile, of course, the Andover, Yale and Harvard-educated Bush's claim to a pure Texas pedigree is rarely questioned.
Dean's real media sin, aside from some clumsy misstatements, seems to be that he's running as an outsider, which always breeds contempt among the Washington press corps. As governor of Texas, Bush pretended to run as an outsider in 2000, but nobody in the news business took the claim seriously. Dean, though, seems bent on it, including taking aim at the Beltway press. When he officially announced his candidacy with a June 23 speech, he asked rhetorically, "Is the media reporting the truth?" And instead of schmoozing reporters on the campaign trail and handing out playground-type nicknames the way Bush did in 2000, Dean treats them professionally, but pushes back when he thinks they're wrong.
Perhaps not surprisingly, it's the Washington Post — particularly its editorial and Op-Ed pages, which double as the house organ of the D.C. establishment — that has taken the lead role in deriding the surging outsider. But the rest of the press also seems eager to play along with the established, critical Dean narratives.
This should be an interesting race, as I predict two all-or-nothing candidates. As for me, I'm all-or-nothing against Bush (with the possible exception of an anarchist coup that leads to the installation of a fascist dictatorship). So if Dean it must be, so (hopefully), Dean it will be.
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P.S.: For those of you who are unaware, the Bushes are actually from Connecticut, not Texas—which explains Bush, Sr.'s curious lack of that charming Texas drawl.
