G
Gandalf Grey
Guest
How Trivial Can the Media Make the Presidential Race?
By Matt Taibbi
Created Jan 16 2008 - 9:38am
December 28th, a beastly-cold afternoon in Story City, Iowa. Another school
gym full of polite, placard-bearing Iowans herded in to support yet another
pomp-and-ceremony-promising presidential candidate, in this case Hillary
Clinton.
Hillary's late, however, so the campaign decides to pass the time by sending
a pair of central-casting Adorable Local Children onstage to chuck HILLARY
'08 T-shirts into the crowd. A young Hillary volunteer in a standard-issue
Pale Blue Button-Down Shirt (the mandatory uniform of all campaign
volunteers) takes the mike to introduce the kids.
"There's something you should know about these two," Pale Blue Shirt shouts.
"They only respond to NOISE!!! Whoever makes the most noise gets a T-shirt!"
Robotic cheers as the kids hurl shirts in every direction. Last time I saw
this act, it was New Jersey Nets mascot Sly the Silver Fox shooting tees
with a slingshot to "Who Let the Dogs Out" during halftime at the
Meadowlands. This time, the soundtrack is Tom Petty's nauseatingly
Hillary-specific "American Girl." Some reporters are rolling their eyes, but
every camera is dutifully following each flying T-shirt.
"Make sure you get that," a TV guy to my left whispers to his cameraman.
"Got it, got it," the camera guy says.
There must be a hundred reporters here, and every last one has lined up to
capture this event in all its stage-managed glory. There are two camera
risers, both packed to the gills with network shooters. Hillary's lectern is
planted squarely between two enormous American flags; this way, every shot
is sure to make her look like George C. Scott in Patton, with every curve of
her ample jowls bathed in the iconic stripes of Old Glory. Campaigns pay top
dollar for such images in commercials, but the free press literally fights
for space on the risers, for the right to transmit those juicy images for
free.
And when Hillary finally arrives, her speech turns out to be the same
maddeningly nonspecific, platitude-filled verbal oatmeal that every
candidate has spent the last year slinging in all directions -- complete
with the same vague promises for "change" we've heard from every last
coached-up dog in this presidential hunt, from Barack Obama to Mitt Romney.
"Some people think you get change by demanding it," says the former first
lady. "Some people think you get change by hoping for it. I think you get
change by working hard for it every single day."
I see reporters frantically writing in their notebooks and laptops. The line
was the money shot of this whole presentation, tomorrow's headline.
In a vacuum, of course, this is the most meaningless kind of
computer-generated horseshit, the type of thing you would expect to hear
coming out of the mouth of a $200-an-hour inspirational speaker at a
suburban sales conference. But in this tightest of presidential races,
Hillary attacking "hope" amounts to a major rhetorical offensive. "Hope,"
after all, is Barack Obama's own personal spoonful of oatmeal, and by
disparaging it, Hillary has given this gym full of political hacks
tomorrow's sports headline.
And the hacks deliver, right on cue. AN OBAMA-CLINTON TEMPEST BREWS roars
The Los Angeles Times, noting that Hillary's shot at "hoping for change " is
directed at Obama, while "demanding change" is code for John Edwards.
The next stage in this asinine process is the obligatory retorts. Obama
responds by crowing, "I don't need lectures about how to bring about
change." The "change-demander," Edwards, stakes out his own platitudinal
turf, insisting that change isn't about work or hope at all, but about
"toughness" and "courage."
Reading all of this crap the next day, I'm amazed. Here we are, the world's
lone superpower, holding elections at a time when we're engaged in a
catastrophic war in Iraq, facing a burgeoning nuclear crisis in Pakistan,
dealing with all sorts of horrible stuff. And at the crucial moment, the
presidential race turns into something from the cutting-room floor of Truly
Tasteless Jokes #50: "Three change-promisers walk into a bar ...."
I mean, is this a joke, or what? What the hell is the difference between
"working for change" and "demanding change"? And why can't we hope for
change and work for it? Are these presidential candidates or six-year-olds?
This 2008 presidential race looked interesting once, a thrillingly
up-for-grabs affair in which real issues and real ground-up voter anger
threatened to wrest control of America's politics from the Washington
Brahmins who usually puppeteer this process from afar. And while the end
result in Iowa -- a historic and inspirational Obama victory, coupled with a
hilariously satisfying behind-the-woodshed third-place ass-whipping for
status quo gorgon Hillary Clinton -- was compelling, the media has done its
best to turn a once-promising race into an idiotic exchange of Nerf-insults,
delivered at rah-rah campaign events utterly indistinguishable from
scholastic pep rallies. "If there's policy in this race," one veteran
campaign reporter tells me with a sad laugh, "I haven't noticed it."
And while it's tempting to blame the candidates, deep in my black
journalist's heart I know it isn't all their fault.
We did this. The press. America tried to give us a real race, and we turned
it into a bag of ****, just in the nick of time.
Every reporter who spends any real time on the campaign trail gets wrapped
up in the horse race. It's inevitable. You tell me how you can spend nearly
two years watching the dullest speeches known to man and not spend most of
your time wondering about the one surefire interesting moment the whole
thing has to offer: the ending.
Stripped of its prognosticating element, most campaign journalism is
essentially a clerical job, and not a particularly noble one at that. On the
trail, we reporters aren't watching politics in action: The real stuff
happens behind closed doors, where armies of faceless fund-raising pros are
glad-handing equally faceless members of the political donor class,
collecting hundreds of millions of dollars that will be paid off in very
specific favors over the course of the next four years. That's the real
high-stakes poker game in this business, and we don't get to sit at that
table.
Instead, we get to be herded day after day into one completely controlled
environment after another, where we listen to an array of ideologically
similar politicians deliver professionally crafted advertising messages that
we, in turn, have the privilege of delivering to the public free of charge.
We rarely get to ask the candidates real questions, and even when we do,
they almost never answer.
If you could train a chimpanzee to sit still through a Joe Biden speech, it
could probably do the job. The only thing that elevates this work above
monkey level is that we get to guess who wins.
For most of us, this is a guilty pleasure. But some of us get so used to
being asked who should be running the world that our brains start to
ferment. I've seen it happen. The first few times a newbie comes on the
campaign trail, he's watching all the flag-waving and the soldier-humping
and he's writing it all down with this stunned expression, as if to say,
"Jesus, I went to college for this?" Two months later, he's doing six hits a
day on MSNBC as a Senior Political Analyst and he's got this weirdly
pissed-off look on his face, like he's mad that the world woke up and forgot
to kiss his ass that morning. This same meek rookie you saw bent over a
steno book just months ago is suddenly talking about how Hillary Clinton
needs to do this, Barack Obama needs to do that -- and he's serious! He's
not kidding! Next thing you know, he's got an eight-figure book deal and a
ten-foot pole up his crack, and he's wearing a tie and loafers to bed. In
other words, he's Jonathan Alter.
I call it the Revenge of the Nerds effect. Give an army of proud
professionals nothing but a silly horse race to cover, and inevitably
they'll elevate even the most meaningless details of that horse race to
cosmic importance.
This is how you end up getting candidates bludgeoned to death on the altar
of such trivialities as "rookie mistakes" and "lack of warmth"; it's how you
end up getting elections decided because candidates like John Kerry are
unable to overcome adjectives like "looks French" and "long-faced Easter
Island statue."
That's what happened in Iowa. For once, voters tried to say that they were
perfectly capable of choosing a president without us, that they could do
without any of this nonsense. But they were wrong. Nonsense would have its
day!
Saturday, December 29th, Indianola, Iowa. Bucking the usual
late-in-the-Iowa-race trend, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee shows up
an hour early for a midday rally at a crowded lunch spot in this small town
south of Des Moines. But the switcheroo does nothing to shake the massive
crowd of press this self-made front-runner now carries around with him like
the clap everywhere he goes.
With less than a week before the caucus, it's Huckabee's turn to endure one
of the most crucial tests any presidential hopeful faces, the all-out
full-court media press that always gets thrown at the pole position
candidate. Locked in a tight race with Mitt Romney, he has so far taken the
high road, refusing to mention his opponent by name, even though Romney has
been whaling on Huckabee's tax record in recent days with a series of savage
negative ads.
For that offense against the unwritten laws of campaign-trail horseshit,
Huckabee, the one-time media darling of this race, has lately been taking a
beating in the press. Reporters aren't interested in the real story line --
Huckabee the innovative economic populist against Romney the unapologetic
Wall Street whore, the Republican who mortified party leaders by talking
sympathetically about the poor versus the coifed speculator for whom
injustice means the capital gains tax. What the press wants out of Huckabee
isn't more detail about his economic ideas, but evidence that he is willing
to "fight back" against Romney. "Can Mr. Nice Guy go on the offensive?"
wondered Politico.com, a weirdly aggressive torch-waving newcomer to the
media witch-hunt game. "That's the question facing the surging Mike
Huckabee. ..."
That's the question. ... The passive structure of the Politico lede is the
standard method that campaign trail journalists use when disguising value
judgments as statements of fact. There's no data backing up the notion that
this really is the question facing Huckabee; the press is simply making sure
Huckabee can be counted on to jump through any hoops they might decide to
hold up for him, no matter how asinine these tests might be.
And jump he does. In Indianola, Huckabee not only mentions Romney by name,
he unleashes a torrent of anti-Romney abuse. Previously smiling and
Muppet-like in most of his stump addresses, Huckabee today is positively
monomaniacal in his fixation on Romney -- he sounds like a late-stage Lenny
Bruce ranting about cops and Francis Cardinal Spellman. "I did not grow up
privileged," he croaks. "I did not grow up with a last name that opened the
door. In fact, my last name probably closed a few. Never in my life did I
ever remember somebody asking my dad would he be willing to come out and
endorse a candidate."
To me it's Huckabee's worst performance, but the press reviews the next day
are exultant. NICE-GUY HUCKABEE FIRES BACK IN IOWA shouts the Baltimore Sun.
HUCKABEE DROPS 'R-BOMBS' IN IOWA seconds a satisfied Politico.
This scene is a perfect example of the dynamic that dominates virtually all
campaign coverage. No matter which issues or grass-roots support elevate a
candidate to the limelight, in order to stay there he ends up having to play
this game, a sort of political version of Fear Factor in which candidates
must eat bowl after bowl of metaphorical worms to prove their worthiness.
The Huckabee episode is significant because Obama went through the same
thing in the months leading up to Iowa. His refusal to "mix it up" with
Clinton infuriated reporters. "Obama continued to shy away from a real fight
with his Democratic rivals," complained Newsweek, wondering if he knew how
to pursue politics "as a game, played to win."
When Obama responded with a series of parries at Hillary, the press
applauded. OBAMA: BYE-BYE MR. NICE GUY? gushed the Chicago Tribune. OBAMA IN
IOWA: GLOVES OFF! roared ABC.com. ****, even Rollingstone.com got into the
act (OBAMA TAKES THE GLOVES OFF).
The hilarious thing is that while Obama and Huckabee were blasted for not
providing the press with enough boxing-metaphor material, Clinton was
getting the business for being too feisty. IS SEN. CLINTON WARM ENOUGH TO
WIN? wondered Slate. Just like the others, Hillary quickly proved her
willingness to eat as many worms as we could dish out, hilariously releasing
a whole Web site where Friends of Hillary lined up to swear on a stack of
Bibles, that despite what you might think, the candidate isn't a crabby old
battle-ax in private.
This relentless fragging from the media led to state of affairs in Iowa, in
which all of the candidates were enjoined in a seemingly endless piss-fight
over the most mind-numbing minutiae imaginable. Clinton and Obama spent days
haggling bitterly over, of all things, tea. When Obama insisted that his
foreign experience went beyond who "I had tea with," the Hillary camp
actually went through the trouble of releasing a statement from Madeleine
Albright insisting that Hillary, in fact, drank many different beverages in
her travels.
On the Republican side, the Romney-Huckabee war turned increasingly bitter,
with "Nice Guy" Huck calling Romney "dishonest" on the Monday before the
vote. Romney responded by obliquely comparing the Huckabee record on pardons
to that of another Arkansas governor, leading to amusing headlines like
ROMNEY ALMOST COMPARES HUCKABEE TO BILL CLINTON.
How did one of the most genuinely interesting primary contests in American
history devolve into a Grade-D smack-down that even Vince McMahon would be
ashamed to promote? The real story of the campaign has been its
unprecedented unpredictability -- and therein lies the problem. On both
tickets, the abject failure of media-anointed front-runners to hold their
ground was due at least in part to voters having grown weary of being told
by the press who was "electable" and who wasn't. Both the Huckabee and Ron
Paul candidacies represent angry grass-roots challenges to the entrenched
Republican party apparatus, while the Edwards candidacy is a frank and open
attack on his own party's too-cozy relationship with corporate America.
These developments signaled a meaningful political phenomenon -- widespread
voter disgust, not only with the two ruling parties, but with a national
political press that smugly enforced the party insiders' stranglehold on the
process with its incessant bullying of dissident candidates.
But there was no way this genuinely interesting theme was going to make it
into mainstream coverage of the campaign heading into the primary season. It
was inevitable that different, far stupider story lines would be found to
dominate the headlines once the real bullets started flying in Iowa and New
Hampshire. And find them we did.
A month ago, I was actually interested to see who won these first few races.
But now that this whole affair has degenerated into a mass orgy of sports
clich
By Matt Taibbi
Created Jan 16 2008 - 9:38am
December 28th, a beastly-cold afternoon in Story City, Iowa. Another school
gym full of polite, placard-bearing Iowans herded in to support yet another
pomp-and-ceremony-promising presidential candidate, in this case Hillary
Clinton.
Hillary's late, however, so the campaign decides to pass the time by sending
a pair of central-casting Adorable Local Children onstage to chuck HILLARY
'08 T-shirts into the crowd. A young Hillary volunteer in a standard-issue
Pale Blue Button-Down Shirt (the mandatory uniform of all campaign
volunteers) takes the mike to introduce the kids.
"There's something you should know about these two," Pale Blue Shirt shouts.
"They only respond to NOISE!!! Whoever makes the most noise gets a T-shirt!"
Robotic cheers as the kids hurl shirts in every direction. Last time I saw
this act, it was New Jersey Nets mascot Sly the Silver Fox shooting tees
with a slingshot to "Who Let the Dogs Out" during halftime at the
Meadowlands. This time, the soundtrack is Tom Petty's nauseatingly
Hillary-specific "American Girl." Some reporters are rolling their eyes, but
every camera is dutifully following each flying T-shirt.
"Make sure you get that," a TV guy to my left whispers to his cameraman.
"Got it, got it," the camera guy says.
There must be a hundred reporters here, and every last one has lined up to
capture this event in all its stage-managed glory. There are two camera
risers, both packed to the gills with network shooters. Hillary's lectern is
planted squarely between two enormous American flags; this way, every shot
is sure to make her look like George C. Scott in Patton, with every curve of
her ample jowls bathed in the iconic stripes of Old Glory. Campaigns pay top
dollar for such images in commercials, but the free press literally fights
for space on the risers, for the right to transmit those juicy images for
free.
And when Hillary finally arrives, her speech turns out to be the same
maddeningly nonspecific, platitude-filled verbal oatmeal that every
candidate has spent the last year slinging in all directions -- complete
with the same vague promises for "change" we've heard from every last
coached-up dog in this presidential hunt, from Barack Obama to Mitt Romney.
"Some people think you get change by demanding it," says the former first
lady. "Some people think you get change by hoping for it. I think you get
change by working hard for it every single day."
I see reporters frantically writing in their notebooks and laptops. The line
was the money shot of this whole presentation, tomorrow's headline.
In a vacuum, of course, this is the most meaningless kind of
computer-generated horseshit, the type of thing you would expect to hear
coming out of the mouth of a $200-an-hour inspirational speaker at a
suburban sales conference. But in this tightest of presidential races,
Hillary attacking "hope" amounts to a major rhetorical offensive. "Hope,"
after all, is Barack Obama's own personal spoonful of oatmeal, and by
disparaging it, Hillary has given this gym full of political hacks
tomorrow's sports headline.
And the hacks deliver, right on cue. AN OBAMA-CLINTON TEMPEST BREWS roars
The Los Angeles Times, noting that Hillary's shot at "hoping for change " is
directed at Obama, while "demanding change" is code for John Edwards.
The next stage in this asinine process is the obligatory retorts. Obama
responds by crowing, "I don't need lectures about how to bring about
change." The "change-demander," Edwards, stakes out his own platitudinal
turf, insisting that change isn't about work or hope at all, but about
"toughness" and "courage."
Reading all of this crap the next day, I'm amazed. Here we are, the world's
lone superpower, holding elections at a time when we're engaged in a
catastrophic war in Iraq, facing a burgeoning nuclear crisis in Pakistan,
dealing with all sorts of horrible stuff. And at the crucial moment, the
presidential race turns into something from the cutting-room floor of Truly
Tasteless Jokes #50: "Three change-promisers walk into a bar ...."
I mean, is this a joke, or what? What the hell is the difference between
"working for change" and "demanding change"? And why can't we hope for
change and work for it? Are these presidential candidates or six-year-olds?
This 2008 presidential race looked interesting once, a thrillingly
up-for-grabs affair in which real issues and real ground-up voter anger
threatened to wrest control of America's politics from the Washington
Brahmins who usually puppeteer this process from afar. And while the end
result in Iowa -- a historic and inspirational Obama victory, coupled with a
hilariously satisfying behind-the-woodshed third-place ass-whipping for
status quo gorgon Hillary Clinton -- was compelling, the media has done its
best to turn a once-promising race into an idiotic exchange of Nerf-insults,
delivered at rah-rah campaign events utterly indistinguishable from
scholastic pep rallies. "If there's policy in this race," one veteran
campaign reporter tells me with a sad laugh, "I haven't noticed it."
And while it's tempting to blame the candidates, deep in my black
journalist's heart I know it isn't all their fault.
We did this. The press. America tried to give us a real race, and we turned
it into a bag of ****, just in the nick of time.
Every reporter who spends any real time on the campaign trail gets wrapped
up in the horse race. It's inevitable. You tell me how you can spend nearly
two years watching the dullest speeches known to man and not spend most of
your time wondering about the one surefire interesting moment the whole
thing has to offer: the ending.
Stripped of its prognosticating element, most campaign journalism is
essentially a clerical job, and not a particularly noble one at that. On the
trail, we reporters aren't watching politics in action: The real stuff
happens behind closed doors, where armies of faceless fund-raising pros are
glad-handing equally faceless members of the political donor class,
collecting hundreds of millions of dollars that will be paid off in very
specific favors over the course of the next four years. That's the real
high-stakes poker game in this business, and we don't get to sit at that
table.
Instead, we get to be herded day after day into one completely controlled
environment after another, where we listen to an array of ideologically
similar politicians deliver professionally crafted advertising messages that
we, in turn, have the privilege of delivering to the public free of charge.
We rarely get to ask the candidates real questions, and even when we do,
they almost never answer.
If you could train a chimpanzee to sit still through a Joe Biden speech, it
could probably do the job. The only thing that elevates this work above
monkey level is that we get to guess who wins.
For most of us, this is a guilty pleasure. But some of us get so used to
being asked who should be running the world that our brains start to
ferment. I've seen it happen. The first few times a newbie comes on the
campaign trail, he's watching all the flag-waving and the soldier-humping
and he's writing it all down with this stunned expression, as if to say,
"Jesus, I went to college for this?" Two months later, he's doing six hits a
day on MSNBC as a Senior Political Analyst and he's got this weirdly
pissed-off look on his face, like he's mad that the world woke up and forgot
to kiss his ass that morning. This same meek rookie you saw bent over a
steno book just months ago is suddenly talking about how Hillary Clinton
needs to do this, Barack Obama needs to do that -- and he's serious! He's
not kidding! Next thing you know, he's got an eight-figure book deal and a
ten-foot pole up his crack, and he's wearing a tie and loafers to bed. In
other words, he's Jonathan Alter.
I call it the Revenge of the Nerds effect. Give an army of proud
professionals nothing but a silly horse race to cover, and inevitably
they'll elevate even the most meaningless details of that horse race to
cosmic importance.
This is how you end up getting candidates bludgeoned to death on the altar
of such trivialities as "rookie mistakes" and "lack of warmth"; it's how you
end up getting elections decided because candidates like John Kerry are
unable to overcome adjectives like "looks French" and "long-faced Easter
Island statue."
That's what happened in Iowa. For once, voters tried to say that they were
perfectly capable of choosing a president without us, that they could do
without any of this nonsense. But they were wrong. Nonsense would have its
day!
Saturday, December 29th, Indianola, Iowa. Bucking the usual
late-in-the-Iowa-race trend, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee shows up
an hour early for a midday rally at a crowded lunch spot in this small town
south of Des Moines. But the switcheroo does nothing to shake the massive
crowd of press this self-made front-runner now carries around with him like
the clap everywhere he goes.
With less than a week before the caucus, it's Huckabee's turn to endure one
of the most crucial tests any presidential hopeful faces, the all-out
full-court media press that always gets thrown at the pole position
candidate. Locked in a tight race with Mitt Romney, he has so far taken the
high road, refusing to mention his opponent by name, even though Romney has
been whaling on Huckabee's tax record in recent days with a series of savage
negative ads.
For that offense against the unwritten laws of campaign-trail horseshit,
Huckabee, the one-time media darling of this race, has lately been taking a
beating in the press. Reporters aren't interested in the real story line --
Huckabee the innovative economic populist against Romney the unapologetic
Wall Street whore, the Republican who mortified party leaders by talking
sympathetically about the poor versus the coifed speculator for whom
injustice means the capital gains tax. What the press wants out of Huckabee
isn't more detail about his economic ideas, but evidence that he is willing
to "fight back" against Romney. "Can Mr. Nice Guy go on the offensive?"
wondered Politico.com, a weirdly aggressive torch-waving newcomer to the
media witch-hunt game. "That's the question facing the surging Mike
Huckabee. ..."
That's the question. ... The passive structure of the Politico lede is the
standard method that campaign trail journalists use when disguising value
judgments as statements of fact. There's no data backing up the notion that
this really is the question facing Huckabee; the press is simply making sure
Huckabee can be counted on to jump through any hoops they might decide to
hold up for him, no matter how asinine these tests might be.
And jump he does. In Indianola, Huckabee not only mentions Romney by name,
he unleashes a torrent of anti-Romney abuse. Previously smiling and
Muppet-like in most of his stump addresses, Huckabee today is positively
monomaniacal in his fixation on Romney -- he sounds like a late-stage Lenny
Bruce ranting about cops and Francis Cardinal Spellman. "I did not grow up
privileged," he croaks. "I did not grow up with a last name that opened the
door. In fact, my last name probably closed a few. Never in my life did I
ever remember somebody asking my dad would he be willing to come out and
endorse a candidate."
To me it's Huckabee's worst performance, but the press reviews the next day
are exultant. NICE-GUY HUCKABEE FIRES BACK IN IOWA shouts the Baltimore Sun.
HUCKABEE DROPS 'R-BOMBS' IN IOWA seconds a satisfied Politico.
This scene is a perfect example of the dynamic that dominates virtually all
campaign coverage. No matter which issues or grass-roots support elevate a
candidate to the limelight, in order to stay there he ends up having to play
this game, a sort of political version of Fear Factor in which candidates
must eat bowl after bowl of metaphorical worms to prove their worthiness.
The Huckabee episode is significant because Obama went through the same
thing in the months leading up to Iowa. His refusal to "mix it up" with
Clinton infuriated reporters. "Obama continued to shy away from a real fight
with his Democratic rivals," complained Newsweek, wondering if he knew how
to pursue politics "as a game, played to win."
When Obama responded with a series of parries at Hillary, the press
applauded. OBAMA: BYE-BYE MR. NICE GUY? gushed the Chicago Tribune. OBAMA IN
IOWA: GLOVES OFF! roared ABC.com. ****, even Rollingstone.com got into the
act (OBAMA TAKES THE GLOVES OFF).
The hilarious thing is that while Obama and Huckabee were blasted for not
providing the press with enough boxing-metaphor material, Clinton was
getting the business for being too feisty. IS SEN. CLINTON WARM ENOUGH TO
WIN? wondered Slate. Just like the others, Hillary quickly proved her
willingness to eat as many worms as we could dish out, hilariously releasing
a whole Web site where Friends of Hillary lined up to swear on a stack of
Bibles, that despite what you might think, the candidate isn't a crabby old
battle-ax in private.
This relentless fragging from the media led to state of affairs in Iowa, in
which all of the candidates were enjoined in a seemingly endless piss-fight
over the most mind-numbing minutiae imaginable. Clinton and Obama spent days
haggling bitterly over, of all things, tea. When Obama insisted that his
foreign experience went beyond who "I had tea with," the Hillary camp
actually went through the trouble of releasing a statement from Madeleine
Albright insisting that Hillary, in fact, drank many different beverages in
her travels.
On the Republican side, the Romney-Huckabee war turned increasingly bitter,
with "Nice Guy" Huck calling Romney "dishonest" on the Monday before the
vote. Romney responded by obliquely comparing the Huckabee record on pardons
to that of another Arkansas governor, leading to amusing headlines like
ROMNEY ALMOST COMPARES HUCKABEE TO BILL CLINTON.
How did one of the most genuinely interesting primary contests in American
history devolve into a Grade-D smack-down that even Vince McMahon would be
ashamed to promote? The real story of the campaign has been its
unprecedented unpredictability -- and therein lies the problem. On both
tickets, the abject failure of media-anointed front-runners to hold their
ground was due at least in part to voters having grown weary of being told
by the press who was "electable" and who wasn't. Both the Huckabee and Ron
Paul candidacies represent angry grass-roots challenges to the entrenched
Republican party apparatus, while the Edwards candidacy is a frank and open
attack on his own party's too-cozy relationship with corporate America.
These developments signaled a meaningful political phenomenon -- widespread
voter disgust, not only with the two ruling parties, but with a national
political press that smugly enforced the party insiders' stranglehold on the
process with its incessant bullying of dissident candidates.
But there was no way this genuinely interesting theme was going to make it
into mainstream coverage of the campaign heading into the primary season. It
was inevitable that different, far stupider story lines would be found to
dominate the headlines once the real bullets started flying in Iowa and New
Hampshire. And find them we did.
A month ago, I was actually interested to see who won these first few races.
But now that this whole affair has degenerated into a mass orgy of sports
clich