The heavy lift for journalists in 2012
Regular readers of the In Box know that I have plenty of appetite for — and fascination with — horse race stories. And for good reason, I think.
The complex textures of political campaigns, the money, the messages, and the candidates’ style on the stump all matter quite a lot, shaping the thinking of voters and the ultimate outcome of elections.
But in 2012, there is a significant risk that this kind of story will obscure the really revolutionary heft of this election cycle, a vote that could radically change the direction and fabric of our society.
Think that’s overblown?
Consider that the two most prominent Republican leaders of the moment, presidential candidate Mitt Romney and budget leader Paul Ryan, have put forward spending plans that would dramatically shrink the role of government in American life.
This isn’t hyperbole, or political jingoism. It is simply what the GOP is promising to do.
They have decided that the fundamental architecture of government, widely accepted since the late 1930s, should be dismantled and replaced with a model that more closely resembles the republic that existed prior to the New Deal.
In the past, journalists have assumed — correctly, I think — that much of this rhetoric was just that, election-year posturing.
From Ronald Reagan onward, the GOP has talked a solid conservative game and then cheerfully boosted spending, raised taxes, and expanded the national debt.
But the story this year is different. Republicans in the House have flirted almost casually with the idea of defaulting on America’s national debt.
They have stated clearly that fundamental programs serving poor Americans — unemployment insurance, Medicare, student loans, and so on — are on the chopping block.
Programs that Republicans from Eisenhower to Nixon to Reagan embraced are now decried as European-style “socialism.”
The GOP has also embraced unambiguously the idea that corporations and wealthy Americans (or “job creators” as the GOP has rebranded them) should pay far less to fund the services we still receive from the Federal government.
This is a radical departure in a society where progressive taxation has been a mainstay for generations, particularly at a time when the wealthy pay lower taxes than at any other time in the post-Second World War era.
Telling this story doesn’t mean scaring senior citizens about Social Security, or buying into Democratic talking points about student loan interest rates.
What it means is simply examining the GOP’s own plan, taking it seriously, and explaining to voters the kind of departure that conservative leaders envision from the way of life Americans have experienced since Franklin Roosevelt was in office.
That’s a big story and so far reporters haven’t tackled it.
I fear that this is also one of those stories where journalists will be tempted to reach for false equivalencies, or for some kind of artificial “balance.” But that’s just not factually accurate, not this year, not this election.
In fact, one of the big stories in 2012 is that Republicans and Democrats have essentially swapped roles in American society.
During the 1940s and again in the 1960s and ’70s, Democrats largely led the attack on the status quo, demanding huge changes in the way government operates.
The Democratic agenda was often pretty radical, spurred in significant measure by groups on the left who wanted swift, radical reforms.
But these days, Democrats — led by Barack Obama — have taken on the role of defenders of the status quo.
Their argument, boiled down to its essence, is that with a little tweaking and fiddling and belt-tightening, the Federal government that exists now works well enough, and has roughly the right amount of power and influence in our lives.
This is one of the reasons that President Obama’s “hope and change” message has lost so much luster in the eyes of his supporters. The truth is that Mr. Obama, like Bill Clinton before him, appears fairly satisfied with the system that now exists.
Even Obamacare, widely viewed as this president’s biggest and most controversial accomplishment, is hardly a radical departure from the kind of Medicare and Medicaid programs that have existed for decades.
It’s been widely documented that the individual mandate, requiring people to buy some form of health insurance, was originally a conservative idea, one that favored personal responsibility and relied on private companies for its success.
That’s not a very exciting story. As a consequence reporters are often tempted to buy into conservative talking points, that the Democratic agenda somehow represents a vast expansion of government power, or a new attack on free enterprise.
Journalists, economists, academics and even many right-of-center analysts who’ve examined those claims find that they are, bluntly, unsupported by fact.
The Obama White House has used powers that other presidents — including Republican presidents — have wielded for decades.
The point here — and this is important — isn’t that journalists should condemn the GOP’s agenda, or favor the Democratic vision.
Conservatives may, in fact, have formulated exactly the right agenda for the country, and their plan may be exactly what American voters want.
It may be that Americans will decide that the structure, powers and services of the Federal government, that have shaped so much of our society for so long, were a dangerous aberration, or are simply unaffordable, as many Republican leaders believe.
But my fear is that because of a lot of sloppy and lazy journalism, far too many voters will go to the polls next November not understanding the issues, or the stakes, or kind of future they’re deciding on.
Tags: analysis, election12, media, politics
good luck ;-)
The problem you run up against is that the “truth” is considered to be biased.
Brian,
Maybe the media “journalists” are keeping quiet because many of them and most of the media corporations are part of the 1%.
News companies have consolidated and have become “Big Media,” just as we have “Big Oil” and big everything else.
So much news isn’t even news. It’s fluff and it’s advertising for programs aired by the Networks. How is who won on American Idol news?
We are being bamboozled by the “news” and political ads that try to pass for news.
Part of the problem is labeling, the fact that Americans can’t shake the use of terms that are obsolete and fundamentally meaningless.
As Brian points out, Obama and most Dems are now the true conservatives. They want things mostly to remain as they are.
The Republicans are dominated not by conservatives, but by radical reactionaries, who want to turn back the political clock to the Age of McKinley, when the plutocrats like Rockefeller and Morgan ruled kings, working people mainly lived in poverty. and any public deviation from the social and cultural mainstream was harshly punished
While the press is partly to blame, it should not be all that hard for the votitng public to understand this, but it apparently is.
This seems very far from a horse race story, Brian. It’s a balanced essay that I find profoundly sobering.
I do think putting forward the facts on our Federal budget is well worth it and I think you have been trying to do that.
I don’t think many Americans if not most Americans understand what makes up federal spending. So when they hear someone say we need to cut food stamps they start to think well yes we just can’t afford it, and if the live in the North Country they likely know people or at least shop with a lot of people who are using food stamps. They don’t know the CEO of Lockheed Martin. So they might not understand that the food stamp program is a small program.
The only poverty program of any size is Medicaid. The rest are all small. Anyway just pointing those facts out will be good for everyone I hope journalists keep at it.
I can’t remember when we had a national election in which the major issues were soberly debated. It has always (sadly) been a case of demonizing the opposition. There wasn’t as much hyperbole perhaps but JFK had to run against the smear that if he were elected the Pope would run the country. It has only gotten worse since.
There are several fact checking efforts going on but it is true that the major media aren’t participating. They are too busy chasing the popular stories and while their reporters are probably not part of the 1%, they work for the 1% and they don’t bite the hand that feeds them.
I think the media will be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the truth-about-Obama stories, or lose their audience to those who do.
Actually big media are very much part of the 1%, including so called reporters (not referring here to actual journalists).
There is always a lot of negative advertising, but it does seem worse and less fact based than it has been in the past. But maybe it is just rose colored glasses on my part?
I do think we all slant things because at some level we start with biases, those biases are not always wrong either.
But I think this just making up crazy stuff that goes viral is new, the whole bizarre issue with Obama’s birth going back into high school to find classmates and interview them? How crazy is that?
I think they do it because it works though, it works because we have in many ways become a cheap trashy culture that is really very shallow.
You can all watch The Grapes of Wrath on TCM this week, or, if that doesn’t work out maybe have a Woody Guthrie sing-a-long. Your philosophy is that dated and was last relevant 70-odd years ago. On the other hand, if you want to close the “wealth gap” get busy and do what the 1% do: work, create jobs and create wealth. Above all, stop the crying. Jealousy is such an ugly emotion.
Who is crying?
But you know I do think looking at the fact that one change today among the most wealthy is that very few earned their wealth rising from a low income family as opposed to even 20 or 30 years ago when people worked their way up from nothing. Which is fine they can’t help what family they were born into. But economic mobility in the US has fallen drastically over the past 10 years. This is a fact we need to think about, it is not political it is simply a problem.
Politically we see this; I mean Romney for example is the son of the son of wealth, Bush the same. They are both okay people, but they are also pretty unexceptional people, born into a different family both both would probably be moderately good salesmen or something along those lines, good men all around but certainly not presidential material.
If you want to look at political people that have actually done something on their own frankly you have to look at Clinton, Obama and Reagan.
I think it was Tip O’Neil who did comment that our government is “being taken over by the idiot sons of millionaires ”
There is a degree of truth to this.
What do you mean by “done something on their own”? Neither Clinton nor Obama have achieved anything outside of politics. Reagan was moderately successful as an actor and corporate spokesman. Sons of millionaires have been great Presidents (T. Roosevelt) and bad Presidents (Kennedy).
“On the other hand, if you want to close the “wealth gap” get busy and do what the 1% do:”
Thanks for the advice, Larry. Can you give me the number of an insider trader so I know exactly when to dump my next big IPO stock on stupid, lazy 99%er?
http://www.businessinsider.com/exclusive-heres-the-inside-story-of-what-happened-on-the-facebook-ipo-2012-5
“far to many voters will go to the polls next November not understanding the issues…….etc” Sad but true, I think its in a large part due to peoples’ total skepticism about the value of their votes(apathy) Most voters that I’ve spoken to feel the senators and congressmen are boought and sold by big money special interest and totally out of touch with common citizens. And with the mainstream media advertising being dominated now by ads from special interest groups they feel even less inclined to determine the “truth” about important issues. As for Larry 11:04pm, if the 1% are the job creators, where are all the jobs? They have benefited greatly for the past 10 yrs(financially) from the Bush tax cuts but I don’t see any jobs.
No, but I can give you the names of several people who joined the so-called 1% by virtue of their own intelligence and hard work: Steven Jobs (child of unmarried students who was adopted and raised by a payroll clerk and her machinist husband), William Hewlett (son of a medical school professor who died when his son was 12 years old) and Oprah Winfrey (her story is well known). The proof is obvious: many people have achieved great wealth through their own initiative. I suppose it is easier to cry about how unfair life in America is instead of doing what Jobs, Hewlett and Winfrey did.
Larry, The assumption that because you can name a handful of people who went from poverty to wealth anyone can do the same is flawed logic. One could as easily find exponentially more people who tried but came nowhere near wealth.
The facts are often inconvenient, aren’t they? How many examples does one need to prove a point? More, apparently, than I am able to list here. You just won’t acknowledge anything that differs from your liberal ideology. Sad that we have to suffer such liberal intellectual fascism.
We have to assume that Larry is a multimillionaire I guess. The only thing keeping us all from being part of the 1% is our liberal intellectual fascism (and laziness).
No doubt there are people who have achieved regardless of their circumstances. The issue is the fact that the number of those people are going down and have been going down for the past 20 years in this country.
How do you explain that Germany for example has more examples of economic increase than we do? This is a major problem and part of it is structural and part of it is cultural. How do we explain that our wages are now lower for the median worker in the US than many other countries and we have more poverty than other countries?
Now under your thesis the only answer is that we as a group are more stupid and lazy than the individuals in these other countries who are wealthier and less poor than we are; since the structure of government and incentives and public education make no difference?
The 1% or even the top 10% are not wealthy because they are smart or they work harder than the rest. They are where they are primarily due to the very nature of wealth. This is what Jesus meant when he said, “The poor you will always have with you.”
Thing are valuable because they are rare. If everyone owned a thousand pounds of gold, it wouldn’t be worth anything.
It cost a lot of money to be poor in America today. Anyone around to remember when you could buy a new house for under $10,000?
That is NOT what Jesus meant, at least according to biblical commentary. You may have another point, though, Pete. To be wealthy one must really understand the nature of wealth, how to accumulate and preserve it. Many confuse money and wealth, which are very much not the same. Let me know if you would like to hear more. Sorry to disappoint, PNElba, but I am not a multi-millionaire.
Sorry to disappoint, PNElba, but I am not a multi-millionaire.
That’s too bad Larry. Better start working harder.
Yeah, Larry, chop-chop, and quit sponging off the Galts!
Your not rich? What a loser.
Just kidding.
I have no problem at all with people getting wealthy working hard to do so and accumulating a lot of wealth. The point is not to create this us against them idea, the point is to look at how we can help more people do better and to think about the dangers of an unequal society.
From what I can see as a nation we are becoming more economically isolated from one another than in the past. It is one of the reasons that the North Country is dear to me, our children all basically go to the same schools, we all shop in the same stores, climb the same mountains, we live together. Sure some are very wealthy but if they really live here they have the same issues as everyone else.
This is not so in much of the rest of the country. The wealthy self-segregate, living in gated communities, going to only private schools, shopping only in places where other wealthy people shop. This is the model that is followed in developing countries the extreme segregation of rich from not rich. It is an unhealthy thing for any society.
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Why wasn’t Jesus rich? Was he lazy?
Jesus was rich, He owned everything, yet He chose to live a certain way when He was here, which should tell us something.
Christianity is essentially un-Amerian in that sense, I mean humility is not an American virtue, accounting your self as nothing and letting others be above you, not caring about money, it does not really fit our model.
I was at a convention some years back and heard a big name management consultant whose name escapes me at the moment explain that “90%-95% of his sucess was the result of having been born white in America to solid, middle class parents who valued education…all the rest, he went on, taking initiatives, working his butt off, etc. was just gravy around the edges.
In my view the fortunate folks in the 1% tend to undervalue those elements that contributed to their success.
Mervel, Jesus owned everything? Really? It says that somewhere in the New Testament? Or are you making things up?
Walker,
Of course He did, He created everything, He is God. Yes the New Testament shows this in numerous passages.
The point though is that He voluntarily took nothing and lived without many material things and taught us that this was the way He wanted us to live.
Success as our culture defines success; with being number one, having money, honor, fame, pride, being above others is essentially at its core anti-Christian.
I think that is true Fred. Most of what we have in life is a gift, it is not something that we have earned or deserve and this is probably very hard for wealthy people who sometimes like to think the fact that they were given great wealth is somehow an indication that they deserved it.
Hmm, that’s a strange conception, Mervel. Jesus, the son of God, is God, and therefore he owns everything. So Jesus owns crack houses and abortion clinics, tanks and aircraft carriers and all the nuclear weapons, etc., etc.
Is it just possible you don’t really want to say that because God created everything, he owns it all? I can create a table and give it away, and then I don’t own it anymore.
If Jesus owned everything, why didn’t he end poverty on the spot?
You know walker we could get into another discussion of Christianity but that is not what this particular thread is about.
You missed the whole point of what I was getting at about Christ and how He lived and died while on this earth and how that relates to how we think about wealth, money and materialism today.
OK, fair enough, Mervel. But then a better answer to KHL’s “Why wasn’t Jesus rich? Was he lazy?” would have been, “No, he wasn’t lazy, he didn’t value material wealth, and we shouldn’t either.”
Of course putting it that way lays bare precisely how un-Christian a nation we have become, despite many protestations to the contrary.
I thought that is what I said?????? But I could have said it better.
I would agree that we are not a Christian nation in the sense of following Christ, at least outwardly.
Also what does rich mean? Our culture says it means consuming and owning a bunch of material things. But I don’t agree that is what rich is.