"I will put my liberal credentials and my length of time in the liberal trenches up against anybody at MoveOn.org or MyDD or anybody else for that matter," Beckel says. "Have they been in labor strikes, have they been on picket lines, like I have? Did they go out and work on the Equal Rights Amendment? Have they been involved in civil rights? ... [B]ecause I go on Fox all of a sudden I'm not a 'real liberal,' and I'd just say I'm happy to debate any one of them. Let me see what their credentials are."
But for bloggers to put their credentials up against Beckel's, they'd have to know who he is. When they spoke with Salon for this story, neither Matt Stoller of MyDD nor Markos Moulitsas Zúniga of DailyKos, one of the leading liberal blogs, had ever heard of him.
Other Democrats who are chosen to counter Fox's conservative guests and hosts often appear as enablers. They're on-screen to prove to viewers that even Democrats agree that a radical left wing dominates the Democratic Party, not to mention the media.
To see how this works, one needed only watch one segment of "The O'Reilly Factor," wherein Bill O'Reilly discussed, ironically, the cancellation of the Nevada debate. His guests were, it's true, both Democrats -- but they were Democrats who opposed the cancellation and supported Fox News. One, Lanny Davis, had had numerous run-ins with the faction of the party that favored killing the debate -- i.e., bloggers -- when he was closely involved in Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman's reelection campaign last year. Predictably, as soon as he spoke, Davis lashed out at his old foes, saying with some prodding from O'Reilly that "I'm inclined to give everybody the benefit of the doubt here, except the people that were calling for cancellation of the debate because they don't like Fox. I think that's the element of our party that wants to talk to only people that agree with us ... I disagree with this pressure from DailyKos and MoveOn.org to cancel the debate, and I think anybody that took that pressure, including John Edwards, before this incident, ought to be ashamed of themselves." Davis later disagreed with O'Reilly on some small points, but it didn't matter: The larger point that O'Reilly was making, that the loony left had hijacked the Democratic Party, had already been conceded.
It's not the first time Davis has appeared on Fox as an enabler. Last February, when the right was attacking former Vice President Al Gore for making a speech in Saudi Arabia about American abuse of Arabs after 9/11, Davis turned up on "The O'Reilly Factor." He echoed the right's talking points about Gore, saying, "My problem with Vice President Gore's remarks is the location and the judgment that he should make such a speech in Saudi Arabia, of all places ... I think there is some value in our focusing on the few instances where we've made mistakes to apologize. But I don't think a former vice president of the United States ought to be in Saudi Arabia, of all places, to make such a speech."
Susan Estrich, who did not respond to a request for comment from Salon, has frequently come in for criticism for attacking Democrats when she appears on Fox. For example, she once said Gore had gone "off the deep end" for a different speech against some of the administration's policies in the war on terror. Radio host Tammy Bruce, who also did not respond to a request for comment, calls herself a "progressive Democrat," and is billed as such when she appears on Fox. She voted for President Bush in 2004 and spends much of her time assailing Democrats. Her explanation to Alan Colmes was that "the left has gone so far to the left now, they're fascists, and I'm considered a conservative, and I'm pro-choice and I'm a lesbian and I'm a feminist, [but] it's gone so far to the left, I'm considered a conservative."
Then there's former Democratic pollster Pat Caddell who, as the liberal press watchdog Media Matters has documented, has a history of attacking Democrats on-air. First he makes sure to say he's one himself. "I'm a Democrat and I'm a liberal Democrat," he said on one 2004 appearance on Fox's "The Big Story With John Gibson," discussing supposed liberal hatred of the president. "But I'll tell you, I've said to the party before and I said it in speeches, paranoia is going to kill this party." In the summer of last year, on the eve of Lieberman's defeat in Connecticut's Democratic primary, Caddell laid into what he called "the real fringe of this party," saying a Lieberman loss would empower such a fringe. "That's what we're looking at here, this is kind of madness," Caddell said. "The country's going to look at us and say, 'What are you doing?'"
Of course, these Democrats are not mere punching bags and yes men. Sometimes, they are vociferous, stalwart defenders of Democrats and progressive policies, and in speaking with Salon they all made a point of emphasizing that. Political analyst Powers, for instance, asked a network spokesperson to send this reporter a DailyKos diary praising Powers for speedily dispatching Ann Coulter when Powers guest-hosted "Hannity & Colmes." A video of the debate does indeed show Powers pummeling Coulter into stunned, petulant defeat.
But when it comes to less obviously extreme right-wingers, or, for that matter, defending progressives, Powers is sometimes an enabler herself. For example, in January she discussed O'Reilly's favorite new target, NBC News, whose cable channel MSNBC hosts O'Reilly nemesis (and former Salon columnist) Keith Olbermann. On this occasion, O'Reilly's chosen line of attack was on William Arkin, a part-time NBC military analyst who wrote a controversial blog entry for the Washington Post about U.S. troops in Iraq. Powers, despite her opposition to the war in Iraq, used the occasion to hit out at blogs and the antiwar movement, likening Arkin's writing to antiwar tropes coming out of the left, saying, "This was the type of thing that you would expect to read on a far left blog. It has all the hallmarks of the basic far left arguments, which is, you know, the reference to our sons and daughters. We have to save our sons and daughters. The reference to -- they're all pawns, they're all stupid. They don't actually want to be over there. The reference that they only support the war because they have to. What else would they do? They couldn't get up in the morning unless they were."
Next page: Some Fox staffers have already provided revealing glimpses into the network's hiring practices