The fact that David Brooks had already published “three quick points” in a piece entitled “No whining About the Media” defending the conduct of Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos in last night’s democratic debate almost before the debate was over, indicates how bad the debate really was and how miserably Gibson and Stephanopoulos performed. This morning, Sister Toljah opined that today’s top story is “about how liberals in the blogosphere and the punditocracy feel that last night’s ABC News debate was poorly moderated and didn’t contain nearly enough policy questions, and focused too much on side issues,” when actually “Barack Obama had to face some tough questions last night, and they didn’t like it.”
Begging the sister’s pardon, the questions weren’t tough, they were cheap. They were sleazy. Even the policy questions were oversimplified and rhetorically dishonest, designed to create false dilemmas and trap the candidates in false choices. ‘Yes or no, will you promise not to raise taxes? Can you really keep your promise to withdraw from Iraq, when General Petraeus says it can’t be done and that doing so will create chaos?’ etc., etc., ad nauseam. Of course the answers were bad, but they were bad because the questions were gotcha questions, and the candidates, both of them, tried to answer them as though they were serious. Here’s what David Brooks offers in defense of those questions:
The journalist’s job is to make politicians uncomfortable, to explore evasions, contradictions and vulnerabilities. Almost every question tonight did that. The candidates each looked foolish at times, but that’s their own fault.
No, it’s the fault of a media team (I won’t say press corps because that implies some journalistic integrity) so full of its own arrogance as to give Gibson and Stephanopoulos higher billing than the candidates in the show’s introduction and intermission material. “Here are Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos!!” while the candidates stand there with their hands in their pockets. It was about as serious as a Stephen Colbert spoof, where a standard shtick involves Colbert running about the stage taking bows as the audience applauds a guest appearing on his show.
I don’t care about Clinton’s difficulty last night, though I think on the whole she did a better job kicking the shit that was thrown at her than Obama did. But I do care about my guy’s difficulty, and to the extent that any of it is of his own making, I offer these observations. First, Jeremiah Wright is a perfectly legitimate religious and political voice. Obama should simply say so, take back his denunciations and disownings and take his stand with the leaders of his church, most of whom are white, who have gone on the record in defense of Wright and of their church.
Both Obama’s association with Dr. Wright and his association with Bill Ayers (also the business about the flag pin–they brought that up too) are being played in the press in the time-honored tradition of McCarthyism, and the subtext in both cases is racial. The implicit claim is that Obama is a stereotypical liberal and underneath his polished exterior an angry black man. I understand why the Clintons and the Republicans are trying to trap Obama in this fashion, but I don’t understand reporters doing it, except to score with cheap shots. These are not important symbolic issues, as David Brooks claims. In fact, they are not issues at all. They are a kind of political pornography aimed at jingoist and nativist titillation, retailed at worst by charlatans such as Pat Buchanan and Lou Dobbs, whose condescension makes Obama’s seem benign. Obama should continue to point out that he is running against this sort of political rhetoric and has tried to avoid it, himself.
Finally, Obama has twice resorted to ethnic stereotypes in the public sphere, once when he characterized his grandmother as ‘a typical white person,’ and more recently in his now infamous comments about ‘bitter’ working class voters. In the last instance, the more he tries to spin his comments, the worse it gets. He should stop the spinning and apologize frankly and completely for having spoken in ways that are unworthy of his campaign. When he does this he should not indulge in any rhetoric of self-exculpation as Clinton did when she apologized last night for lying about her visit to Bosnia. He should simply say, ‘I’m sorry. I did a bad thing. I regret it, and I hope never to do such a thing again.’ I not only think he should do this, I also think it will work in his favor.
A Los Angeles Times piece from later in the day notes that the overwhelming majority of some 14,000 viewer comments posted on the ABC News website were “critical of the debate moderators.” The same piece also documents criticism of ABC News by representatives of the press and other media outlets. Tom Shales, in The Washington Post argues as I do, saying that “Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, turned in shoddy, despicable performances.”
For the first 52 minutes of the two-hour, commercial-crammed show, Gibson and Stephanopoulos dwelled entirely on specious and gossipy trivia that already has been hashed and rehashed, in the hope of getting the candidates to claw at one another over disputes that are no longer news.
Fair enough. If the producers of ABC News make a corporate decision, as apparently they did, to upstage the candidates and turn a presidential debate into something like a gladiatorial free-for-all, it’s only fitting that some of their own people’s blood get spilled in the outcome.