| Consider--this is not just a break with the conventional wisdom that says Democrats lose because they are out of touch on the issues (too socially liberal) or counter-conventional wisdom that says Democrats lose because they are out of touch on the issues (not economically liberal enough). It's also a break with the counter-conventional wisdom of folks like George Lakoff, who say the problem is Democrats' failure to connect on basic values, where there is a large, untapped advantage to be had.
It's not that Greenwald and Lakoff are ultimately incompatible--they're not. Lakoff is arguing that Democrats need to publicly embrace the moral foundations of their politics, and make those the centerpiece of their public communications. Policies, programs, empirical evidence--all those are well and good, but they only make sense within a framework of values, Lakoff argues. Greenwald's argument is quite compatible: who's going to even listen to your talk about values when Ann Coulter is calling you a girlie man, and Chris Matthews is cheering her on? First, you've got to fight back, and beat them down.
Which is exactly what Greenwald does.
Even if it were true that right-wing leaders were all heroic, Greenwald points out, that would hardly mean that their policies were sound. (After all, great players rarely make great coaches.) But in fact, these leaders, with few exceptions, are almost all modeled on John Wayne--a hero onscreen, but an adulterous pill-popping draft-dodger in real life. Everything they talk about is the opposite of what they do. And so the first chapter, "The John Wayne Syndrome" is devoted to debunking the John Wayne mythos, taking note of the high points of hypocrisy that will recur repeatedly among the contemporary figures discussed later in the book.
Ironically, Greenwald notes, even when a Republican is a war hero, that matters far less than that he act the part. There is no better example of this than George H.W. Bush, a Navy fighter pilot in WWII, who was shot down in combat, but was widely mocked by other Republicans in contrast to Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan, who, just like John Wayne, served his country by staying home and cheering on the "Greatest Generation" from the comfort of Hollywood. It was only by adopting a swaggering persona during the 1988 campaign--as when he attacked Dan Rather to avoid questions about his role in the Iran/Contra Affair--that Bush was finally able to project the requisite aura toughness. Reality had nothing to do with it.
The second chapter is arguably the heart of the book, honing in on how the media and right-wing political operatives feed off of one another. The next three chapters deal with three major areas of right-wing hypocritical mythologizing--"Though Guise" (macho/military heroism), "Wholesome Family Men" ("family values"), and "Small Government Tyrants" ("limited government")--clearly delineating the scope of contradictions between word and deed. However, chapters three is clearly the most important of these, because of how central tough guy posturing is to the whole dynamic right-wing/press dynamic described in chapter two. The final chapter deals with John McCain, and was written after the other chapters, after he had secured the nomination.
Although McCain's status as a battle-tested veteran clearly sets him apart from the common John Wayne mold, the same was true of George H.W. Bush, but that clearly counted for nothing in Bush's case--only the macho act he adopted while running for president mattered. McCain's been playacting a lot longer--and, of course, the media dynamic is much more developed now than it was back then:
The GOP nominee for 2008--John McCain--is, in virtually every important respect, a completely typical Republican presidential candidate. He relies upon character mythology far more than substantive positions on issues to sustain his appeal. He endlessly claims to uphold personal values that he has chronically violated in reality--including his vaunted apolitical, truth-telling independence; his devotion to "traditional family values"; his Regular Guy credentials; his supposed hostility to the prerogatives of the elite; his honor-bound integrity; and his commitment to limited government and individual liberty. One finds, in McCain's actual life, rather than in his rhetoric and media-sustained mythology, one act after the next that directly violates each of these relentlessly touted principles, and in that regard, he is a standard, run-of-the-mill Republican hypocrite.
The electoral dynamic discussed in this book applies to McCain most vividly when it comes to the reverence that most of our nation's establishment political journalists harbor for him. The vast bulk of the establishment press, as many unashamedly admit, are blindly enamored of McCain and swoon in his presence--probably more so than any modern political candidate in many years, if not decades. As a result, just as was true for Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush before him, McCain has been permitted to construct a public image that is unscathed by any critical scrutiny from an adoring, even intimidated political press corps.
(An extended excerpt dealing with the media's treatment of McCain has been published at Huffington Post here. It centers on the striking similarity of how McCain is being marketed just like Bush in 2000 as a "different kind of Republican.")
While David Brock and Paul Waldman's book, Free Ride: John McCain and the Media (reviewed here), does an excellent job exploring the origins of this dynamic in its unique specificity, Greenwald accomplishes the complementary task of showing how it fits into a larger pattern that encompasses figures who share none of the specifics that Brock and Waldman focus on. As with Lakoff, the point is not that Greenwald undermines the Brock/Waldman analysis. Quite the opposite. He powerfully illuminates the larger landscape in which McCain's romancing of the media takes place.
Given how deeply and relentlessly he's been tracking such matters, the greatest challenge must have been how to narrow his focus in such a target rich environment, but he does so brilliantly by focusing on the feminizing attack on John Edwards, revolving around his expensive haircuts in a media campaign fueled by The Politico, which wrote eight stories in three? weeks, with dramatic impact on the rest of the media, thanks to prominent links from Matt Drudge.
This story not only highlights Greenwald's main thesis about the role of fabricated gender narratives, it underscores the central role of corrupting partisan actors such as Drudge, Limbaugh and Rove on contemporary journalistic practice.
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E | While Drudge (a closeting gay) and Limbaugh (an adulterous drug addict) are lying gossips whose personal foibles echo those of the political figures they promote, regarding Rove, Greenwald notes:
Rove's function is to manipulate the media, conceal information from them, and induce them to say what is politically beneficial to the President. In a world where political journalism performs its most basic functions, media manipulators like Rove are the natural enemies of journalists.
But for our journalist class, Karl Rove is the North Star of what they do--he provides their instructions, their leaks, their scoops, their access. And as the purveyor of Beltway political power, he is their most admired leader. "When Rove speaks, the political class pays attention--usually with good reason," Borger proclaims. That's because by taking their cues from Rove, sitting as he did for so long at the center of power (near the high school quarterback at the jocks' table in the cafeteria), they are rewarded, patted on the head, given the treats they crave. |
It's not just that Mark Halperin of Time and John Harris, of The Politico, wrote that "Matt Drudge rules our world" in their 2006 book, The Way To Win. Greenwald cites objective evidence of how that actually works:
one web analyst estimated in March 2007 that Drudge accounted for 65 percent of Politico's traffic (the next-highest source of traffic for The Politico was Google at a mere three percent.)
Greenwald then shows what happens when such influence is not extended, by comparing the swift disappearance of another, strikingly similar story about Mitt Romney spending $300 for two make-up sessions. Without benefit of Drudge's link, this story went nowhere, while the Edwards haircut story resulted in two questions in presidential debates--the second one five months after The Politico's "reporting" frenzy.
Getting to the heart of his argument about the right-wing/media dynamic, Greenwald writes:
What is notable here is not so much the specific petty attacks, but rather the method by which they are disseminated and then entrenched as conventional wisdom among our Really Smart Political Insiders and Serious Journalists. This is the endlessly repeated process that occurred here:STEP 1 A new Drudge-dependent gossip (Ben Smith) at a new substance-free political rag (The Politico)--or some rightwing talkradio host (Rush Limbaugh) or some credibility-bereft right-wing blogger (a Michelle Malkin)--seizes on some petty, manufactured incident to fuel clichéd caricatures of Democratic candidates.
STEP 2 The old right-wing gossip (Drudge) employs his old, substance-free political rag (The Drudge Report) to amplify the inane caricatures.
STEP 3 National media outlets, such as AP and CNN, whose world is ruled by Drudge, take note of and begin "analyzing" the "political implications" of the gossip, thus transforming it into "news stories."
STEP 4 Our Serious Beltway Journalists and Political Analysts--in the Haircut Case, Tim Russert and Brian Williams and Adam Nagourney and the very serious and smart Substantive Journalists at The New Republic--mindlessly repeat all of it, thereby solidifying it as transparent conventional wisdom.
STEP 5 When called upon to justify their endless reporting over such petty and pointless Drudge-generated matters, these "journalists" cite Steps 1-4 as "proof" that "the people" care about these stories, even though the "evidence" consists of nothing other than their own flocklike chirping
It should be noted that the process described here bears a striking resemblance to the process of mainstreaming hard right memes described by David Neiwert in his Koufax-winning series from 2003, Rush, Newspeak and Fascism [PDF]. There's little wonder in that, really. The real wonder lies in why we, in the liberal blogosphere, have taken so long to catch onto this and to formulate effective counter-measures. Yes, certainly, we face long odds in struggling to do so. But we haven't even really educated ourselves sufficiently to have a common, taken-for-granted understanding of what's going on.
At the very least, Great American Hypocrites should change that once and for all. But it should do much more than that. It should serve as a wakeup call for funders, foundations and others working on issues that cannot get a decent hearing for their issues, because of the dominance of the freakshow dynamics that Greenwald compellingly documents and dissects.
We often hear talk about the trivialization of our news, our politics, our public sphere, and somehow, by association, it seems that--collectively at least--we somehow think that this trivialization is itself a trivial matter. To the contrary, Greenwald shows that nothing could be more important, because until we deal with it, nothing else fundamental can be done. |
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