Dear Wingnut,
Why has the Republican Party (and, it seems, a large portion of the conservative movement in general) embraced such an anti-science, anti-intellectual position? Growing up in a Republican household in the 1970s and ’80s, I was exposed to the likes of William F. Buckley, Jack Kemp and others who promoted the GOP as a party that could tackle issues intelligently. Basic sciences were supported, at least if seen as leading to improvements in business or defense.
Thirty years on, whatever intellectual elements that are left in the GOP seem to be drowned out by the likes of Limbaugh and Palin, who appear to be openly contemptuous of educated people. Senators such as James Inhofe sneer at any science that may challenge their worldview.
Is this mind-set now integral to the GOP and the conservative movement? Is there any path back to a party the embraces intelligence and scientific curiosity?
Regards,
Chris
Dear Wingnut,
Are conservatives really anti-science? This would seem to be an odd position to hold, especially as you seem otherwise so keen on industry, commerce, business and enterprise. But this is what we conclude from attempts to restrict the teaching of evolution in public schools, denial (and outright denigration) of climate change, and the ridicule poured on anyone with any thoughts on how to minimize the damage being done to the environment. Sometimes it seems like Luddism; sometimes it seems like you haven’t even noticed that you are attacking the basic laws of biology and physics in order to keep the tortuous logic for some ideological convictions going.
Thanks for any answers.
Al
Hello again. I continue to be encouraged by the number of responses this column receives each week. It shows that intellectual curiosity is alive and well on both sides of the political fence — which brings me to this week’s topic: Are conservatives really anti-science?
To me, the question is almost laughable on its face. Conservatives are pro-science and, as a general rule, pro-cost-benefit analysis and pro-thinking. It is conservatives who believed, as we now know to be true, that you can “shoot down a bullet with a bullet” and who believed a workable defense against ballistic missile attack was possible. And who utilized science and engineering and underwrote billions in research and development to prove it could be done and put in place a system that, while not perfect, is a significant improvement over the “throw up our hands because there is nothing we can do” approach it replaced.
As president, George W. Bush put a scientist in charge of the Energy Department and created the position of U.S. undersecretary of science; proposed an Advanced Energy Initiative that called for a quantum increase in funding available for research into and development of new, cutting-edge technologies to lead America to more abundant and stable energy supplies; and proposed the American Competitiveness Initiative to, in the words of former Secretary of Energy Samuel W. Bodman, “fortify America’s leadership in science through additional research funding in the physical sciences and by strengthening math and science education.”
House Republicans, under Speaker Newt Gingrich, proposed doubling the budget for the National Institutes of Health and dramatically increased federal financial support for the fight against diabetes. And it was Bush who tried to put a risk-averse NASA back into the business of space exploration by proposing a return to the moon and manned flight to Mars.
I could go on but I think the conservative record is pretty strong on this point.
Let me say that I understand how Al’s question is influenced by years of misleading rhetoric from presidential opponents who were vigorous in branding his administration “anti-science” because of the position it took on stem cell research.
To set the record straight, George W. Bush was the first president to propose federal funding for stem cell research. As Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson said in August of 2004, “President Bush provided — for the first time — federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. The president’s unprecedented decision allows for federal funding of research using existing stem cell lines that were derived before Aug. 9, 2001, with no limits on private funding of research.”
Not exactly an anti-science position, is it?
To the extent that limitations were placed on federal funding, it was because of the ethics involved, not the science. Acting on the recommendation of a blue-ribbon commission that looked at the issue for some time, the president decided it would be unethical — in the moral sense, not the legal one — to act as those who believe embryonic stem cell research holds the cure to everything that ails us would have had him do.
I also understand how easy it is to take a single case or a lone issue and distort it in ways that give credence to the idea that science takes a back seat to politics.
Imagine this as a lead in the New York Times: “Caving in to political pressure, the Obama administration today released a budget that puts an end to research supporting the use of advanced technologies to generate hydrogen for use as a transportation fuel.
“Turning its back on years of promising research, the administration is putting a halt to what some scientists say is the potential for using carbon-emissions-free advanced nuclear technologies to generate hydrogen that could be used to fuel a new generation of emissions-free motor vehicles. The move is part of a continuing effort to downgrade the importance of research into certain technologies that may ease dependence on U.S. energy imports.”
Or this: “Despite decades of study that support the idea it would be a safe repository in which to store the nation’s nuclear waste, congressional Democrats today cut off funding for the proposed nuclear waste repository located in Nevada at Yucca Mountain.
“Ignoring volumes of scientific data that attest to Yucca Mountain’s safety and suitability as a site for long-term storage, the Democrats instead acceded to the wishes of Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, who personally opposes the project and voted to kill funding for the site.
“At the same time Democrats continue to look askance at the Global Nuclear Energy Project, first conceived by the Bush administration as a way to share the benefits of peaceful civilian nuclear technology with the developing world in a proliferation-resistant manner through the use of nuclear fuel reprocessing, a technology that could reduce the volume waste needing long term storage.”
As long as enough people repeated it enough times, in the ways I have written here, you would pretty soon have people believing the Obama administration was anti-science or anti-technology.
To conclude, conservatives are not anti-science or anti-technology. If anyone is anti-science it is the global warming, excuse me, global climate change extremists who, ignoring the holes in their own theories and the inconsistencies in their own projections, are willing to cripple U.S. industrial manufacturing, energy production and the economy in an attempt to reduce carbon emissions.
I hope that helps.
Dear Wingnut,
Last week you answered a good one: Did Bush break America? In the wake of Arlen Specter’s flight to the Democratic Party, I think you need to field a somewhat tougher query: Did Bush break the Republican Party? I ask as a social liberal who has, nevertheless, sometimes voted for Republicans. It’s hard not to feel that the Karl Rove strategy of firing up the base has left a Republican Party that is now nothing but a fired-up base. How does your party win back a voter like me … someone who values pragmatism above ideology?
Best,
Joe
Hello, again. Last week’s column provoked a robust debate, and I thought a number of you made some interesting comments. I wish I could answer them all, but there is only so much bandwidth available, you know? So let me get to this week’s question.
Taking the Bush issue first, I think it is fair to say that Bush left the Republican Party in far worse shape than it was when he entered the White House.
Some of that is bad luck, some of it results from bad planning and, frankly, some of it comes about as a result of distortions of his presidential record put forward by the Democrats and promulgated by the media — which pushed voters in the center away from Bush.
I know that many of you will seize on that last part as indicative of sour grapes on the part of conservatives, but we do recognize that when you’re president of the United States, it’s part of the job. I only hope you can recognize that it happens to be true.
I will say — and remember that Joe is asking a conservative to defend the Republican Party (and they are not the same thing) — that Bush is not the only one responsible for the electoral misfortunes of the GOP. The party leadership in Congress, particularly in the House of Representatives, shares in the blame. Elected on a reform platform in 1994, by the middle of this decade they had became more concerned, one pollster recently told me, “with ruling rather than governing.” And I think the party leadership — Bush and the Congress — neglected to provide much of an agenda that was worth voting for after the 2006 election.
Come 2008, you had a situation where the country was tired after eight years of Bush, Obama was offering “change,” and McCain was offering, well, nothing. And that leads me into the second half of Joe’s question, the part about winning back pragmatic voters who are more concerned with results than with ideology.
If the answer was simply to field candidates who were more moderate, McCain — who still probably would have lost — would have turned in a much better performance than he did. And if McCain had run better, that likely would have translated into fewer GOP defeats in the Northeast and Midwest and would have held the Democrats to about 55 or 56 votes in the U.S. Senate. So simply being more moderate, being more like Democrats — as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the Republicans should be this week — is not the answer.
I believe that the answer to winning back voters like Joe is for the GOP to provide effective solutions to the problems facing the country, solutions that have their roots in conservative principles.
America remains a center-right country. Its economic values are still based on the values of the capitalist system. And our social values are equally center-right, as could be seen as so many people rose to the defense of Miss California, Carrie Prejean, after she stated her opposition to same-sex marriage in the Miss USA pageant. She may have lost the crown, but I think she won the country.
Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress have offered ways to solve the problems most Americans say are foremost on their minds, like healthcare and the collapse of the financial system. So the American people have been willing to go along, because they have not been presented with viable alternatives, or because what alternatives are out there have not made it to the forefront of the debate.
The polling data reflects this. Numbers out this week from the firm Public Opinion Strategies — and reflected in other surveys I’ve seen — show that while Obama remains personally very popular, his agenda has been gradually but steadily losing support. But his personal popularity is not enough to keep things moving his way over the long term; at least I don’t think it can, because the level of change he is pushing as he goes about “the work of remaking America” is so dramatic. As former House Speaker Newt Gingrich wrote this week in a column marking the end of Obama’s first 100 days, “Everything from his economic policy to his energy policy to his just-announced science policy, President Obama has successfully moved the country from a traditional American model of entrepreneurship and private initiative to a European model of regulation and government control.”
What I know about the country tells me that voters like Joe, who make a point of voting for the person, not the party, and who have a serious internal need to be seen as “thinkers” — and who make up a goodly portion of the political center — are already starting to drift away from Obama and his agenda.
When they reach the point where they are up for grabs, the Republicans will have to have prepared an agenda of effective solutions based on our collective understanding of the real world so that they can attract voters like Joe back into their coalition.
Now, speaking as a conservative, I am hopeful that the issues upon which the Republicans will make their stand will be taxes, spending, the huge increase in federal debt as a percentage of GDP, revitalization of the economy, expanding access to healthcare without compromising its quality, maintaining a strong national defense and providing more parents — particularly those in the inner city and those who are economically disadvantaged — with some form of scholarships to make it easier for them to get their children out of failing public schools and into successful private schools where they can learn and they can achieve.
If the GOP can come up with a persuasive agenda on the economy, on healthcare and on education, I think it has more than a fair shot at winning back the “Joe voters” once they become dissatisfied with the left-leaning overreach of Obama and the Democrats.
I hope that helps.
Hey wingnut,
Why is it my conservative friends won’t admit the truth: that George W. Bush “broke” the United States of America?
Sincerely,
Mitchell
Hello again. Judging by your response to my first three columns, this feature is proving quite popular. I appreciate all the letters that you have taken the time to send. I am sorry I am not able to answer each one of them personally.
This week I’ve been asked to explain why conservatives won’t admit that George W. Bush “broke” the United States of America. It’s an interesting question, so open-ended it’s difficult to choose the way to answer it.
The short answer is they won’t admit it because it’s not true. George W. Bush did not break the country. Many conservatives believe history’s judgment will be much kinder to him and his accomplishments than the current crop of historians and commentators allow and that he will eventually be seen in a much better light than he is today.
That is not to say he was near perfect. There are things that occurred on his watch that, whether Bush was directly responsible for them or not, are cause for legitimate conservative criticism. But this is far different from what I am sure many of you would point to as his failings as president, for example the idea — really a canard — that he “lied” us into war in Iraq.
It may be true that the decision to invade Iraq was partly based on faulty intelligence, that information the United States and other nations believed to be accurate regarding Saddam Hussein’s intentions to develop chemical, biological and, particularly, nuclear weapons was not, in fact, accurate.
Bush may have been incorrect, but that is different by many degrees from engaging in a deliberate falsehood, as more than a few historians now believe occurred with President Lyndon Johnson following the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which led to a major increase in the U.S. commitment to the defense of South Vietnam.
Critics on the left blame Bush for a decline in America’s global prestige and connect it to his foreign policy. I would like to point out that his clear-minded prosecution of the war on terror resulted in Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi’s giving up his nation’s nuclear weapons program, among other things. Barack Obama’s make-nice approach got us a book accusing the United States of being a neo-colonial bully from Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez. I know which outcome I prefer.
On the right, the criticisms of Bush started during his 2000 race for the White House over his emphasis on “compassionate conservatism,” which many feared was really just another way to talk about “big government” conservatism.
Events proved these concerns were, at least in part, justified. Fred Barnes, writing in the Weekly Standard in 2005, just about a year after Bush was reelected, cited six reasons they were, starting with the fact that Bush was not, in fact, a conventional conservative.
“He deviates on the role of the federal government, on domestic spending, on education, on the Medicare prescription-drug benefit, and on immigration,” Barnes wrote. And by “deviates” Barnes meant favoring an expanded role for the federal government, counter to the limited-government philosophy of the Reaganite Republican Party.
But Bush gets credit for his pursuit of tax cuts that, rather than create the economic mess we are currently in, helped fuel economic growth. Under Bush, the economy and the stock market strengthened from 2003 to 2007 following the reduction in the capital gains tax from 20 to 15 percent and the tax on dividends was reduced from 35 percent to 15 percent.
Following the 2006 elections, when the Democrats regained control of Congress, it became clear that the House and Senate would not continue the lower rates. The response by investors to the promise of higher dividend and capital gains taxes started the decline in the stock market.
To those who understand the relationship between government and the economy it is no wonder that private investors, faced with these two near-certainties, changed their behavior. It’s similar to the relationship between the realization that there were enough votes in Congress to pass the Smoot-Hawley tariff increase and the onset of the Great Depression. The stock market is a leading, not a lagging indicator.
If there are places where Bush’s stewardship of the economy is to be faulted they are the way in which government, and government spending, expanded on his watch and the way in which the federal government violated basic free-market principles through its handling of the initial round of TARP bailouts.
Many conservatives opposed, as one wrote recently, “the idea that we would be able to bail out various financial institutions with taxpayer money, thereby stabilizing markets and mitigating losses while instilling confidence among investors and the general public.”
As we now all know, it didn’t work — under Bush, who conceived it, or under Obama, who expanded it. And it opened the door for an unprecedented — in my lifetime anyway — level of intervention by the White House in American business.
Those who blame Bush for the bursting mortgage bubble overlook his efforts to bring greater regulation to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the way congressional leaders like Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., and Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., interposed themselves between the White House and efforts at reform. Could Bush have done more? Maybe, but he’s also not solely to blame.
The “blame Bush” approach also ignores the way the Clinton-era revisions to the Community Reinvestment Act and pressure from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, again during the Clinton presidency especially, led to an increase in the number of people being given home mortgages who really never should have gotten them.
Before I close, there is one last point I want to make. It is fallacious to argue that George W. Bush or any other American president can or could “break” the United States. We are a strong country, full of amazing people who sometimes do incredible things. We are innovative, resilient, forward thinking, committed to liberty, and we remain, even for all our faults, a shining example to the rest of the world. The idea that any one man or woman, any president, could break the country runs counter to the true spirit of America.
I hope that helps.
Do conservatives really believe that giving gay people the right to marry will completely dissolve the country’s social structure? That people will start wanting to marry animals and slippery slope and all that?
It seems so implausible to me — but I am gay and monogamous and am raising kids with my partner of five years, so my perspective is skewed. It would just really help me out to be able to get married. I’m not thinking about ruining the game for anyone else. I just want to join.
Thanks,
Jack
Hello again. Judging by the response of some of you to this new Salon feature, I’ve certainly got you thinking. That’s good. And today’s question, I’m pretty sure, is going to provoke the most robust debate thus far.
Contrary to what many supporters of gay marriage seem to believe, the opposition to gay marriage is not motivated, as a general rule, in large part or small, by bigotry. I am aware there are many gay-marriage advocates who refuse to accept that there really can be a legitimate difference of viewpoint on the issue.
These are the same people who, let me suggest, are not so much concerned about how they live their own lives as they are with forcing other people to accept how they live, to validate the lives they have made for themselves. And that’s what inspires the first conservative objection to gay marriage, the one born out of respect for society and those social traditions that, over time, have demonstrated that they exist for everyone’s benefit.
Marriage goes in that category and is, indeed, one of the reasons that so much of the civil code is concerned with the idea of marriage. And by that I don’t mean marriage as we have come to believe it should be — two starry-eyed people mooning over each other, in love forever — but marriage as the best way to establish an enduring relationship between adults to best protect the interests of children and, to some degree, women. Marriage established a mechanism for the training and upbringing of children and provided for the disposition of familial assets in ways that protected the property rights of those who had a share in creating the assets in the first place.
Over two millennia society has concluded that the best way to do that is a sanctioned relationship between a man and a woman. And conservatives, as a general rule, have an interest in conserving those traditions.
Second, there is the consideration of what we might call “the sacred,” the truths that come from faith. Our social order — and our civil code — comes primarily from our religious institutions. For those for whom the sacred is of paramount importance, the acceptance of gay marriage into the social order, which would be greatly advanced by the imprimatur of state approval, should not be encouraged. These folks, regardless of what faith they profess, whether Jewish, Muslim, Protestant, Catholic or Pentecostal, are likely to be more intense in their opposition to gay marriage than other conservatives.
Religious conservatives also have another fear, one that I think is legitimate. They’re afraid that a change in the civil code will force a change in religious institutions. What happens if gay marriage becomes legal, and a particular creed or denomination, because of its own precepts, wants to opt out of performing gay marriages? (And I refer here specifically to actually performing the marriage, not whether or not the religious organization “endorses” or condemns gay marriage.) The legal recognition of gay marriage could threaten the independence and self-determination of those religious institutions that refuse to perform same-sex marriage ceremonies within their walls.
There is precedent for this, as in the way Henry VIII threatened the churches in England after his divorce from Catherine of Aragon. And there are real-world examples from today, such as the case of a Christian photographer who was forced by the New Mexico Civil Rights Commission to pay $6,637 in attorney’s costs after she refused to photograph a gay couple’s commitment ceremony.
Then there is the matter of individual liberty as relates to the coercive use of the power of the state to change beliefs. Even those conservatives who support gay marriage or who do not feel passionately about it one way or the other — and I find myself in this category — may still object strongly to the attempts to coerce them into accepting it.
Many conservatives I know take the position that what two adults want to do in terms of their own relationship is essentially a private matter. As the English actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell once said, “Does it really matter what these affectionate people do, so long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses?”
Their objections to gay marriage center on the way the debate has unfolded. While agnostic on the idea of whether it is a good or bad thing, they take exception to the fact that a few unelected judges in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts took it upon themselves to make this an issue that every American had to deal with.
This sentiment extends beyond conservatives. Consider that no presidential nominee of either major party has endorsed gay marriage, nor have the Republican or Democratic Party national platforms. And in every state that I can think of where the matter has been put to the people as a ballot proposition, the voters have affirmed the idea that the definition of marriage is and should remain something between a man and a woman.
I am aware that Steve Schmidt, who ran John McCain’s unsuccessful presidential campaign, came out last week in favor of ending the GOP’s opposition to gay marriage. But I question the wisdom of adopting political strategies proposed by the fellow who led a losing GOP national campaign, one that rejected conservative values as a general rule, and that couldn’t even win in a state like Virginia, which went to the Democrats for the first time since 1964.
I have yet to see a convincing argument that the effort to force gay marriage on the nation is effectively divorced from the effort to force people to change their views on homosexuality. As conservative writer, talk-show host and lesbian Tammy Bruce says, “Gays ultimately need to stop looking to government for unconditional love and approval of who we are.”
Looking to government to force states to legitimize gay marriage, Bruce continues, “gives the government and other people’s opinions far too much power over the quality of our lives and effectively eliminates our own responsibility for our happiness. “
I don’t know if Bruce is right or not when she attributes the ongoing political struggle to what she refers to as columnist Andrew Sullivan’s lament — “that it is only governmental recognition of who we are that will make us whole.” What I do know is that many conservatives’ objections to gay marriage have as much to do with the problem of overreaching state power as they do with what some people might call the moral aspect of the question.
I hope that helps.
From his undisclosed location, our undercover conservative columnist answers one of your most pressing questions: What's up with that rather intense Republican congresswoman from Minnesota?
By Glenallen Walken
Dear Wingnut: How do you account for Michele Bachmann? I just don’t understand.
First, let me say how gratified I was by the response to the initial column in this series. I hope, in the days to come, we will be able to engage in a dialogue that will explain to you the mysteries of conservative thought.
This week the editors have asked me to answer a question that more than one reader asked: explain Michele Bachmann. As in, can you explain the behavior of the Republican representative from Minnesota’s 6th Congressional District? The easy answer would be to say no and then move on to something else. But that wouldn’t make for much of a column, so let me try.
Bachmann is a conservative activist, someone whose interests include both social and economic policy. Now she and I, to the best of my recollection, have never met, but the extensive coverage some of her remarks have received makes me feel as though I know her.
I suppose your interest is generated by some of the things she has said that strike you as, well, extreme. Like when she recently referred to her desire that people in Minnesota be “armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax” before going on to cite Jefferson’s observation that a little revolution, now and again, is probably a good thing.
The way I saw it reported, with convenient ellipses and commentary inserted in all the right places, you would have thought she had issued a call for an armed uprising. What she meant, of course, is that the people of Minnesota — where electricity production is heavily dependent on coal — needed to be armed with information so they could argue effectively against the introduction of a tax on carbon or a cap and trade scheme that would hurt her state’s workers and working families.
I am also aware of her assertion, as reported by Salon and countless other outlets, that children might be bound for “re-education camps.” That strikes me as mere hyperbole — besides, that couldn’t happen unless we went to year-round public schooling, which the teachers’ unions all oppose.
“I haven’t purposely been trying to be inflammatory,” Bachmann said in one recent interview. “I’m trying to just explain to the American people what’s happening here in Washington, D.C.” But, and this is just my opinion, she might be better off if she worried more about her constituent service and less about making a splash in the media.
It is true that many conservatives love her, because she is not afraid to get out in front on an issue and make a big splash. By stepping out in front, however, she often leaves the party’s congressional leadership trailing after her instead of leading the discussion. And, by leaving them behind, it makes them question the wisdom of defending her.
At some level, she is becoming a self-parody. Some of her comments have put a big, red media bull’s-eye right in the middle of her forehead. And, deserved or not, this causes everything she says to be treated with a greater degree of scrutiny than she probably welcomes or than is good for her. That said, conservatives love what they perceive to be her fearlessness, the same quality that no doubt provokes the wrath of liberals who cannot stand to see an attractive woman stand up for what have come to be known as traditional values. When it comes to the women’s movement, Michele Bachmann is so far off the reservation she might as well be in France — and as Sarah Palin and other conservative women holding political office have found out, that can be a lonely place to be.
One conservative colleague with whom I discussed this question told me that Bachmann was “energetic, and adds a layer of hope to a movement that is sorely in need of it,” and that “she touches the heart of grass-roots, kitchen-table conservatives while retaining an air of sophistication.”
In the end, Bachmann is a solid, principled conservative who stands up for what she believes. Some people may not like that, people like David Shuster of MSNBC, who never seems to miss a chance to poke a finger in her eye. And, to my mind, the motivation here is political. There are any number of liberal activists and Democratic operatives who believe her congressional district, while heavily Republican, is of a more moderate brand of conservatism than she sometimes espouses; therefore, enough ridicule will lead her constituents to vote her out. It’s a strategy that certainly worked in Pennsylvania against Rick Santorum, who essentially hung himself with a series of ill-considered comments in just one interview.
On the other hand, there is no shortage of people holding extreme, even bizarre views in Congress, Democrat and Republican alike. Like the member of Congress, and she knows who she is, who wanted to have hearings into how the CIA was responsible for the epidemic of crack cocaine plaguing the black community.
Now I don’t know if that “explains” Michele Bachmann or not. Perhaps I have grown jaded during all my years in Washington and things that ought to faze me no longer do. I do know one thing: Nothing she has said is any crazier than the idea that the federal government can tax, spend and borrow America’s way back to economic prosperity. But that’s a subject for another day.
Monday, Apr 6, 2009 10:55 AM UTC
From an undisclosed location, a conservative answers your questions about why his people do what they do. This week: Is it the media's fault the GOP keeps losing?
By Glenallen Walken
Dear Wingnut: Do conservatives really think it’s the media’s fault that the GOP lost in 2006 and 2008?
Let me begin by saying it’s a pleasure to help Salon inaugurate this new feature, in which I have the unenviable task of explaining American conservatives to you. It’s a big job but, as they say, someone has to do it and, well, I drew the short straw.
So — was it the media’s fault? It’s a good question, and an important one.
It is undeniable that the U.S. elite media — what both liberals and conservatives sometimes call the “mainstream media,” or MSM — skews to the left. From the news pages to the editorial pages to the Op-Ed pages — where even the conservatives tend to be statists (we call them “big government conservatives”) — the liberal point of view on any issue receives more favorable treatment than the conservative one.
Don’t believe me? No, you don’t. Let me give you a couple of examples from the 2008 presidential race, one about the media treatment of the Democratic candidate, one about how the media covered the Republican candidate. During the campaign the MSM refrained from examining in real detail the relationship between Barack Obama, then a U.S. senator, and William Ayers, a fellow who once led a group called the Weather Underground that, many years ago, put bombs in government buildings intending for them to explode.
Now it is absolutely true — as his campaign said repeatedly anytime a conservative raised the issue (and a few did) — that Barack Obama was a mere child at the time that Ayers and his cohorts were engaged in activities involving explosives. That’s why the campaign argued that the relationship between the two men — a tenuous one, it claimed — was not worth attention.
But put yourself in our shoes. Let’s say a Republican presidential candidate had attended an event at the home of an activist who, 20 or 30 years prior, had led a group involved in bombing abortion clinics or black churches in the American South. Do you think for one minute the relationship between the candidate and host would not have been investigated to the nth degree? Can you blame us for being a little upset?
Then there’s the treatment of John McCain. How about the wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more New York Times story about John McCain and a Washington lobbyist? The story insinuated a sexual relationship but offered no proof. The lobbyist sued and the Times settled. The paper did not pay the lobbyist any money, and did not retract the story, but 1) allowed the lobbyist’s lawyers to post their views on the lawsuit on the paper’s Web site; 2) issued a joint statement with the lobbyist and her lawyers that said, “The article did not state, and The Times did not intend to conclude, that Ms. Iseman had engaged in a romantic affair with Senator McCain or an unethical relationship on behalf of her clients,” and 3) posted a note to readers saying the same thing. All of this occurred in February, more than three months after the election. And after every media organization in America had reported on the story.
Negative press coverage is something that conservatives have come to expect. Do you remember the echoing nods of approval after the Oklahoma City terror bombing when President Bill Clinton tried to blame it on conservative talk radio? Or the way in which the Gingrich Congress was savaged over claims it was cutting Medicare when it was actually proposing to spend more money on it, just not as much as the liberals wanted? When you’re a conservative politician, you have to think of ways to get around the MSM.
But to return to the original question — do we blame the media for Republican losses in the last two election cycles? Despite everything I have recounted, in a word, no. They may give lip service to blaming the media, but Republicans recognize that they must shoulder the blame themselves.
In 2006, for example, they should have dealt more aggressively with former Rep. Mark Foley when some of his activities — surely indicative of poor judgment but not, thus far at least, shown to have been illegal — were brought to their attention. It was the Foley scandal that caused the GOP’s numbers to dip in October, costing them control of at least the House.
It does appear that House Democratic leaders knew more about that particular scandal than they were telling long before it broke, making me wonder about how “shocked, shocked” they really were. But it was the Republicans’ responsibility to do something about it, just as the Democrats should have done something about former Rep. William Jefferson of Louisiana before the voters sent him packing.
It wasn’t the media that went on an orgy of spending mimicking the behavior of sailors on liberty; it was congressional Republicans. It wasn’t the media that turned its back on the principles of limited government; it was the Republicans. And it wasn’t the media that nominated John McCain for president (though the media helped by anointing him its favorite Republican) — it was the Republicans. So conservatives don’t really blame the media for the election losses in 2006 and 2008. We blame ourselves, which is why what we have been doing, airing our internal ideological laundry in public, has been so much fun for you to watch. And for the media to cover, gleefully.
I hope this helps.
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