Category: The Dish

"Do you honestly believe that someone with a solid track record as a lawmaker in a Heartland state which elected him to the U.S. Senate, who is now seeking to make some positive American history as our first black president, is somehow un-American, or unpatriotic? Does that even make any sense? Question his policies, or question his leadership. because that is your job as a journalist. But don’t insult our intelligence by questioning his patriotism," – Will Bunch, Philadelphia Daily News.

The truth is: neither Gibson nor Stephanopoulos believes that Obama is unpatriotic. But they think it is their duty as journalists to ask the question.

With any luck, you missed the ABC News fiasco last night. My live-blogging is here. My verdict here. Reader response here. Blog-reax here.

Tom Shales, WaPo’s TV critic on Gibson and Stephanopoulos.

Some more reaction from around the web:

The Glittering Eye:

There were a small number of interesting points which I suspect will go unnoted in the din. First, Sens. Clinton and Obama used different definitions of “the middle class” in answer to Charlie Gibson’s attempt to extract from them a “no new taxes” on the middle class from them. Hillary Clinton defined the middle class as families earning an income lower than $250,000, a definition with which I’d agree. Basically, that’s all but the top 1% of income earners. Sen. Obama’s definition was families earning an income below $75,000. I think that’s an extremely narrow definition. It doesn’t even include all of the fourth quintile who to me are obviously middle class.

The Swamp:

…for Hillary Clinton to get so giddy about the Wright question was really just sad. She was the official purveyor of fringe talking points. Shockingly so. And, she seemed to enjoy it. There’s a reason people think Clinton is dishonest as we saw today in the findings of the Washington Post-ABC News poll. She’s not only in this to win, she’s in it to win dirty — and to destroy Obama. She invoked Louis Farrakhan tonight for no reason — just to say it.

Give me a break. Throughout this campaign, Clinton has pursued GOP attacks against Obama. He has not gone there against her.

Michael Grunwald:

Clinton’s main argument was that she can beat John McCain because she’s already been vetted in this culture, "having gone through 16 years on the receiving end of what the Republican Party dishes out." She’s basically saying that her dirty laundry-the questionable money she made in cattle futures, the Travelgate firings, her kiss of Suha Arafat, her husband’s pardons, the unpleasantries of 1998-is no longer newsworthy, and the mere fact of her political survival shows that it’s irrelevant. "I have a lot of baggage, and everyone has rummaged through it for many years," she said. Obama hasn’t rehashed that baggage, although he did slyly remind Americans about her 1992 crack about staying home and baking cookies, ostensibly to make that point that she had been treated unfairly, probably with an ulterior motive. But in any case, it’s not like she’s survived all that baggage unscathed; she’s got sky-high unfavorable ratings. And it’s not like Republicans would agree not to raise all that baggage in the fall if she somehow became the nominee. Hey, she even said everything’s legitimate when you run for office.

Althouse:

[Clinton] can reel out the policy when that’s what’s required. But cruel political fighting unleashes her super powers.

Whatever else you say about last night: don’t blame ABC News:

The journalist’s job is to make politicians uncomfortable, to explore evasions, contradictions and vulnerabilities … We may not like it, but issues like Jeremiah Wright, flag lapels and the Tuzla airport will be important in the fall. Remember how George H.W. Bush toured flag factories to expose Michael Dukakis.

So Lee Atwater wins by default? We are losing a war, we have destroyed our fiscal future, the planet is in distress, we have effectively quit the Geneva Conventions, the economy, propped up by massive public and private debt, is teetering … and we all have to actually defend the fact that this election will be decided on the basis of closet Muslims, flag lapel pins, and ’60s terrorists?

Brooks actually gives ABC News an "A" for their questions. The job of debate moderators is to generate an actual discussion about the issues and questions that matter in deciding between two candidates. They make an editorial choice about what those questions are. To focus almost exclusively on idiotic process questions based on the lowest form of political debate imaginable is an editorial choice to run a tabloid freak show. I see no reason to excuse Obama’s bad performance. But I cannot fathom why we should exonerate the execrable standards of ABC News at the same time.

I should say up-front that I’ve learned a lot from reading Ross’s and Larison’s challenges to my alleged connection between disorienting economic and social change and the rise of religious fundamentalism. I also learned a lot from the latest Teixeira/Abramowitz study on the working poor and the Democrats. I think the evidence does indeed complicate my previous inferences and connections. What have I gotten wrong? Fundamentalism obviously appeals to the wealthy as well as the poor; it may even, in certain circumstances, appeal more to the wealthy than the poor (I haven’t denied that, but my emphasis has obscured it). And it has done very well in prosperous suburbia and among more educated white voters. The question is whether a sense of economic and cultural alienation has fueled fundamentalism as well. I still think it does, but less powerfully than I did before. On abortion, for example, Teixeira notes the GOP has had more success in appealing to upper-middle class whites than to working class ones. That’s an important insight. But it remains true nonetheless, as Teixeira also notes, that the working class white vote is still more pro-life than the middle class white vote (43 percent to 33 percent).

What the Rove GOP has done well, I think, is to lump all this together into a generalized cultural grievance, and used this to appeal to white rural voters, whose distrust of government and elites has grown with their relative economic decline. The gay question – which is a prism that obviously colors my own experience of this – makes this more acute.

There surely is a correlation among the working white poor between questions such as immigration, race, gender, gays, God, and guns. And the kind of God that is part of this group of attitudes is rooted in a more certain variety of faith than that in, say, many upper middle class Catholic or Protestant or Jewish homes. It is part of a cultural identity in which many of these questions go together in people’s guts as much as their minds. And that’s the bundle of feelings that less scrupulous Republicans have exploited or simply appealed to, depending on your point of view. And some of these emotions are indeed somewhat bitter or angry.

Teixeira points out that this group keeps getting smaller. But its geographical distribution increases its clout in the electoral college in ways that help frame political appeals on these grounds; and these appeals in turn help solidify a certain cultural identity (that tends to vote GOP) and that is then reinforced by explicitly religious appeals from the GOP leadership. I think the connection is still there – but, after absorbing these critiques, it is much more complicated than I had previously understood.

(I should add that I don’t actually think, from Obama’s own writings, that he can be fairly categorized, as Larison does, as a disciple of "liberation theology." But that’s another debate.)

Not McCain’s best idea:

I was flabbergasted by John McCain’s proposal to suspend collection of the federal gas tax for this summer. Suspending this user tax would deprive the Highway Trust Fund of $8-10 billion in much-needed revenue to patch potholes, rebuild failing bridges, and keep the Interstates and other key arteries from further declines in their already pathetic levels of performance. And this comes at a time when the Trust Fund is already facing a 2009 shortfall of $2-3 billion (thanks to Congress legislating more highway spending than existing gas-tax revenues can support). Plus, since the gas tax is only about 5% of the cost of a gallon of gas, the savings to motorists would be trivial.

Kelley Vlahos remarks on the bravery female soldiers have shown and the challenges they face:

Officially, women have not yet ventured into combat, held back by critics who argue that putting them into armored cavalry squadrons or rifle platoons will threaten unit cohesion, weaken standards, and increase injuries, hurting overall force strength. But advocates of full integration insist that women can hold their own on men’s terms. Making them “legitimate” will help transform military culture and bolster unit cohesion.

These arguments are academic, for women are in combat today. While the Bush administration initially appeared less interested in integration than its predecessor, the decision to invade Iraq in 2003, the miscalculation of the subsequent insurgency and civil war, and the desire to wage a global terror war have made it impossible for the all-volunteer force to function without women in combat roles. Reality has taken over.

Guage dog friendliness by tail-wagging direction? Right-waggers are ok; left-waggers dodgy. And no, I don’t think there’s much political salience in this.

Doug Feith stands his ground:

One wonders whether anyone in the Bush establishment actually believes they ever made an error.