Month: August 2008

Movements

by digby

Here is a fascinating post over at Mother Jones:

Is Barack Obama exaggerating when he compares his campaign to the great progressive moments in US history? We asked two dozen writers, thinkers, and historians to answer that question; read their responses below.

I think the most interesting thing about the answers is the degree to which just about everyone sounds ambivalent or confused. It’s a very odd array of answers from people who are immersed in politics and history and who should be able to rattle off a compelling rationale for the candidate without any problem, even if they disagree with the notion that it’s a movement on par with civil rights or the labor movement. I think all of the people queried want Obama to win, but virtually none of them seem to be sure what he’s going to do.

This convinces me that the central problem for the campaign is that nobody knows what Obama stands for. It’s a perennial problem for Democrats, but I think it may be an even bigger problem this time. The hope and change theme was galvanizing in the beginning but it isn’t enough to sustain full campaign. What was once inspiring has become a fog.

As for whether the campaign is comparable to other great movements in American history, it is obvious to me that it is not. That’s not to say a progressive movement doesn’t exist, but the Obama campaign is a slightly unorthodox political campaign (more orthodox by the day) with an historic candidate, which isn’t the same thing. They may merge at some point, depending on how Obama chooses to govern, but at this point, I think the 21st century progressive movement (such as it is) will work outside the administration and on the edges of the Democratic party for some time. The institutional torpor of the party and the internalization of the belief that conservatism is a default setting of the American political soul means that it’s going to take more time than I had hoped. If the professionals can’t make a strong and creative case for progressive rule after the spectacular Republican meltdown during the Bush years, then it’s clear they have a long way to go.

Any Democrat would be at least marginally better than John McCain and Republican hegemony so I’m not particularly moved by the question of whether we are being led by a savior or a disappointment at this point. I just want to ensure that we don’t have another psycho running things. I am interested in whether this nascent progressive movement can actually coalesce into something meaningful by gathering enough political power and cultural heft to actually do something. At this point I have no earthly idea if that will happen but I’m fascinated by the prospect.

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So Many Half-Truths, So Little Time

by dday

Just because I want to keep track of this stuff, here are some more stories providing strong evidence of John McCain’s growing problem with telling the truth. Both relate to Saturday’s Saddleback Forum but are also anecdotes and excerpts he habitually brings up on the trail.

In the first question of the forum, he was asked to name three people he would “rely heavily on” for advice and counsel. One of the three he named was the great civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis (D-GA). McCain has no relationship with Lewis despite serving in Washington with him for 22 years.

Later, McCain told the story he often tells on the campaign trail, a little joke about how the federal government spent $3 million dollars to study the DNA of bears in Montana. At the time, he never sought to remove the earmark appropriating money for the bear project, despite seeking to reduce funding for other projects in the same bill; and he voted for the final bill.

And, he claimed that he would never have nominated Justices Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer, though he voted to confirm all three of them.

I think I need to start keeping a list.

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The Gasbag Audience

by digby

Pew has published its annual study of the American news habits and it’s as interesting as ever:

A sizable minority of Americans find themselves at the intersection of these two long-standing trends in news consumption. Integrators, who get the news from both traditional sources and the internet, are a more engaged, sophisticated and demographically sought-after audience segment than those who mostly rely on traditional news sources. Integrators share some characteristics with a smaller, younger, more internet savvy audience segment – Net-Newsers – who principally turn to the web for news, and largely eschew traditional sources.

Like web-oriented news consumers, Integrators are affluent and highly educated. However, they are older, on average, than those who consider the internet their main source of news. Overall, Integrators spend more time with the news on a typical day than do those who rely more on either traditional or internet sources; far more enjoy keeping up with the news a lot than in any other news segment. Integrators also are heavier consumers of national news – especially news about politics and Washington – and are avid sports news consumers. Television is their main news source, but more than a third cite the internet as their primary source of news during the day. This reflects the fact that a relatively large proportion of Integrators log on to the internet from work (45%). The 2008 biennial news consumption survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press was conducted by telephone – including both landline phones and cell phones – from April 30 to June 1 among 3,612 adults nationwide. It finds four distinct segments in today’s news audience: Integrators, who comprise 23% of the public; the less populous Net-Newsers (13%); Traditionalists – the oldest (median age: 52) and largest news segment (46% of the public); and the Disengaged (14%) who stand out for their low levels of interest in the news and news consumption. Net-Newsers are the youngest of the news user segments (median age: 35). They are affluent and even better educated than the News Integrators: More than eight-in-ten have at least attended college. Net-Newsers not only rely primarily on the internet for news, they are leading the way in using new web features and other technologies. Nearly twice as many regularly watch news clips on the internet as regularly watch nightly network news broadcasts (30% vs. 18%).

This web-oriented news segment, perhaps more than the others, underscores the challenges facing traditional news outlets. Fewer than half (47%) watch television news on a typical day. Twice as many read an online newspaper than a printed newspaper on a typical day (17% vs. 8%), while 10% read both. However, Net-Newsers do rely on some well known traditional media outlets. They are at least as likely as Integrators and Traditionalists to read magazines such as The New Yorker and The Atlantic, and somewhat more likely to get news from the BBC.

Fully 82% of Net-Newsers get news during the course of the day, far more than the Traditionalists and the Disengaged, and slightly more than the Integrators. Nearly all who get news at this time go online for information (92%). Yet they do tap traditional sources at other times of the day; nearly two-thirds get news late in the evening and of these, more rely on television news than the internet. Despite sweeping changes in the news landscape, Traditionalists remain the largest segment of the overall news audience. Compared with the Integrators and Net-Newsers, Traditionalists are downscale economically – 43% are not employed and 60% have no more than a high school education. Television dominates as the favored news source among Traditionalists. And at each time of the day – whether morning, daytime, dinner hour, or late at night – overwhelming majorities who get news at these times cite television as their main source. Unlike the news Integrators, or those who mostly get news from the web, most Traditionalists say that seeing pictures and video, rather than reading or hearing the facts, gives them the best understanding of events. Most Americans fall into the three core news audiences – Integrators, Traditionalists, or Net-Newsers. The fourth group – the Disengaged – are very much bystanders when it comes to news consumption. They are less educated on average than even the Traditionalists and exhibit extremely low interest in – and knowledge of – current events. Just 55% of the Disengaged get any news on a typical day, and just 20% know that the Democrats have a majority in the House of Representatives.

Sadly, there are as many Disengaged as there are Net-Newsers, so they pretty much cancel each other out. That leaves the other two, the largest of which is the “traditionalists” who not only get their news from television, they mostly get it from the images not the words.

I know that most of you are far to busy and too well informed about the issues and the real news to waste time watching the crap the Entertainment Industrial Complex churns out for the rest of the folks, which is why both dday and I spend a lot of time dissecting the television gasbags. It’s partially to understand what they are all saying to each other in their tight little feedback loop, but it’s also to try to see what the TV news watchers are seeing. Keep in mind that these aren’t necessarily stupid people (although some are — they exist in all groups of humans) but that they simply choose to use television as their primary source of news, which, considering how much of it is available, isn’t all that surprising. People who don’t have jobs that feature computers or have the time to spend online, naturally put the TV on in the background or sit down to decompress for a bit when they can, and consume their news passively.

And that’s where the Village media really has an impact. Their willingness to allow themselves to be conduits — in words as well as pictures — for these phony GOP images and manufactured story lines makes them defacto tools of the right wing, who spend many millions developing campaigns for the consumption of fellow villagers — to disseminate to that 46%.

Here’s James Moore talking about Karl Rove a few years back:

He once told a consultant that we interviewed for “Bush’s Brain” that you should run every political campaign as though people are watching television with the sound turned down. And toward that end, you rely heavily on imagery and not very much on substance, knowing that if the President is photographed in a school of minority and ethnic children, and is interested in their future in that particular photo op, that people will trust that image. And they don’t go beyond that image to look at his policy, which is signing the “Leave No Child Behind Act” in a big, high-profile moment with Senator Ted Kennedy, and then gutting the heart out of that bill with the funding that he offers up for it.

The President has become very good at these phony linkages. For instance, you’ll see him running around talking about the tax bill, saying we need to get it passed so that we can create jobs for people. Factually, this tax bill -– there’s not an economist in America or a successful business person, Warren Buffet among them, who believes that getting rid of the taxation of dividends is going to create jobs anytime in the near future, and ostensibly in the long term. But if the President says it over and over enough, people will believe it, just as Karl Rove got him to say over and over that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11.

At time of the war in Iraq, the Pew survey showed 61 percent of Americans believed the canard about Iraq. So the whole concept is to speak as though you are a compassionate, sensitive, caring guy, and create these photo opportunities that prove that. But do whatever you want to do when you govern, because the public isn’t paying very close attention. And they’ve gotten away with it thus far.

Cheney famously said “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter. This is our due” I think he actually meant Reagan proved the facts don’t matter, do what ever you want…

And they use the same willing tools to smear their opponents and these days the television types even dutifully run a chyron at the bottom of the screen to help those who aren’t paying attention know how to interpret the pictures they are seeing. Over the week-end, CNN had numerous segments featuring the Corsi book, all of them accompanied by little factoids on the bottom of the screen featuring the name of the book and some of the charges contained within it. It mattered not at all what the talking heads were blathering about to those who just saw the screen shot while they were passing by a television screen. They got the name of the book and the author and that it says Obama is a phony and a liar. That’s all the Republicans ever wanted.

Thank goodness for Media Matters and FAIR and others for doing the daily drudgery of tracking and compiling all this stuff — no pun intended. Their great columnists also like to discuss and analyze the effect TV news has on politics and what we might do about it, as do I. I’m not sure we are entirely successful, but I do think it’s necessary. There are still many more people who are informed by Brian Williams and Meredith Viera than by Josh Marshall or Glenn Greenwald. We need to understand what they’re being told.

Luckily, the other segments of the new consumers are growing and perhaps we will soon be in a world where more people get informed from the internet than TV. It’s certainly an improvement over the passive TV consumer model, even in the partisan echo chambers, especially since the TV gasbags have become parodies of themselves in ways that even Paddy Chayefsky couldn’t have imagined.

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The Other Consequence

by dday

I think Digby is definitely right in saying that the hostilities in Georgia will give the neocons another historical incident they will use in the future as an example of how we cannot abandon fellow freedom fighters. But there’s another consequence of this resumption of Cold War-era rhetoric – the resumption of Cold War-era weapons systems:

The Wall Street Journal’s August Cole had an interesting take on Russia’s invasion of Georgia this weekend: it’s great for Lockheed Martin, Boeing and other mega-defense contractors. A stock analyst is quoted as saying that the invasion was “a bell-ringer for defense stocks.”

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has recently thought out loud about cutting major weapons programs like Lockheed and Boeing’s $143 million F-22 Air Force raptor jet and Boeing and SAIC’s $160 billion Future Combat Systems. Gates has argued that they bear no relevance to counterinsurgency fighting that is currently taking place in Iraq and Afghanistan. But Russia’s invasion of Georgia at least raises the possibility of a future U.S.-Russia conflict. according to Rep. Jack Murtha (D-Pa.), who said as much to the Journal.

As the piece notes, this is a bipartisan problem. There are pieces of the military industrial complex in every state and every Congressional district. The perceived threats we face in the world mean absolutely nothing to those who want to build weapons to face those threats. The mere appearance of a new Cold War is enough to build F-22’s and missile defense systems and plenty of other prototypes. The Iraq war has been a windfall for contractors and a new arms race would just open that up even more. This is going to be unbelievably difficult to beat back, and without a recalibration of the military budget providing the kind of investments needed in moving to a post-carbon future, providing health care to all Americans and rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure will be next to impossible.

It’s the cherry on top of all the neocon warmongering.

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Little Mary Quite Contrary

by digby

So Mary Matalin is now saying that she is just a “consultant” to the Threshhold imprint that put out the Corsi garbage.

From Matalin’s email to Noah, published in an August 15 update to Noah’s August 13 article on Slate.com:

Appreciate your taking the time to talk about Obama Nation in your column. I sent your inquiry regarding future printings to Simon & Schuster because such issues are not mine to decide. I am sorry you did not receive a response. My title is somewhat misleading, but it is the one the publishing industry uses. I do not deal with any mechanics (like print runs, reprints, financial relationship with authors), or for that matter, editing of the Threshold books. I am more akin to a consultant relative to the issue of potential interest among political readers.

Her recent modesty doesn’t let her off the hook, obviously. Regardless of her official job description, that quote in the NY Times shows that she enthusiastically in the effort to put Corsi’s lies into the mainstream. And she certainly knew what the “potential interest” would be of rightwing neanderthals and the rich Republican propagandists who pay for bulk orders, in a book called “Obamanation.” All of her Villager friends in the media sure did help her get it “out there.”

Media matters also notes:

From the August 12 New York Times article:

Mr. Corsi, who has over the years also written critically about Senator John McCain, Mr. Obama’s probable Republican opponent, said he supported the Constitution Party presidential nominee, Chuck Baldwin, and had not been in touch with McCain aides. He called his reporting on Mr. Obama, which he stands by, “investigative,” not prosecutorial.

Ms. Matalin said in an interview that the book “was not designed to be, and does not set out to be, a political book,” calling it, rather, “a piece of scholarship, and a good one at that.” She said she was unaware of efforts to link it to any anti-Obama advertising

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It occurs to me that Matalin seems to be the big earner in the Carville family lately. She’s all over the place, working in the administration, shepherding books of lies, being a hard working member of the right wing hit squad. What’s James done lately?

It’s not that I think a woman shouldn’t be the breadwinner, particularly when she is far more successful at her profession. But I would have thought that James would keep his hand in, just for appearances sake. Their business model depends on them being the “even cats and dogs can get along” couple. It loses cache when one member of the dynamic duo fades into oblivion. The last thing I remember him doing was was co-producing that awful remake of All The King’s Men.

But hey, they’ve certainly made plenty of money over the years as the village’s favorite post partisan couple, so I guess there’s no need for both of them to keep working. Wingnut welfare pays far better anyway.

Update: Jonathan at ATR points me to this:

At three o’clock, Corsi hadn’t yet left the hotel, and he was dressed in his radio clothes: blue blazer, pocket square, light khakis, black lace-ups. He had an appointment to tape a segment for Anderson Cooper and, later, for Larry King, so he changed into a business suit, with a red tie. Then he and Bueler headed down to the lobby to await their black car for the six-block trip to CNN. Bueler listened to a message from Mary Matalin, at Corsi’s publishing house, who wanted to compare notes on the main themes of attack being levelled against them. (Corsi cited “nitpicking” and “name-calling.”)

She was barely involved at all …

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Believe Your Eyes

by digby

Kevin is right when he says that painting McCain as a rich, hypocritical warmonger is not going to get the job done. This country has proven more than once that it likes rich, hypocritical warmongers just fine. That line of attack shows that the Democrats aren’t merely playing the game less effectively than the Republicans, they aren’t even on the same playing field.

Kevin offers this advice:

Why not concentrate on character critiques that have some real grounding in reality? Just to give a few examples:

• McCain is old and gets confused occasionally.
• McCain is running an ugly, smear-based campaign.
• McCain has a legendarily short fuse.
• McCain is annoyingly self-righteous.
• McCain’s straight talk has evaporated in the face of his need to win evangelical votes.

I couldn’t agree more. He also treats women like chattel, is cozy with lobbyists even though he’s built a reputation as a reformer and has marched in lockstep with every one of George W. Bush’s bad policies over the past seven years.

But, let’s face it. That’s not likely to happen. The Obama campaign does not want to be involved in negative campaigning on this scale and perhaps, as the new, lesser known guy, Obama has to be more careful of such things.

That, needless to say, is why the independent expenditure groups would have been so important. It’s now rumored that the donors have been set free to finance some non-campaign related efforts, but it would be a miracle if they could pull it off at this late date. These things have to be planned — something I’m sure Freedom’s Watch and their advisor Karl Rove have certainly been doing for months.

We can hope that all these McCain character traits are self-evident and that nobody believes the onslaught of character assassination and outright lies about Obama. It could happen. People believe what they want to believe. But I’d feel better if there was something a little bit more that “hope” on this one.

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Showbiz For Smart People

by digby

I don’t know if anyone cares about this, but The Hill has published a schedule of events at the DNC. Check it out. It sounds … erm, riveting.

(I joke. I’m sure it will be a lot of fun.)

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They Did It

by digby

For several weeks I’ve been issuing joking disclaimers that my criticisms of McCain on completely unrelated subjects should not be considered an attack on his service in Vietnam. (I did it earlier today.) It never occurred to me that they’d actually go there but, apparently, the suggestion that McCain might have heard the questions before he appeared on stage at the Saddleback event — because he wasn’t in a “cone of silence” after all — is impugning his integrity as a POW.

For real:

Nicolle Wallace, a spokeswoman for Mr. McCain, said on Sunday night that Mr. McCain had not heard the broadcast of the event while in his motorcade and heard none of the questions. “The insinuation from the Obama campaign that John McCain, a former prisoner of war, cheated is outrageous,” Ms. Wallace said.

Well ok then. The man is incapable of cheating because he was a POW. We shall hear no more about it.

(Of course his first wife and the shareholders in the Lincoln Savings and Loan might disagree, but far be it for me to bring that up.)

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Chutzpah

by digby

From Raw Story

The Real Truth About Obama Inc., a group formed by anti-abortion activists, is trying to establish a Web site and air radio ads. But the group’s attorney says his clients fear they will be prosecuted for breaking federal rules that restrict fundraising and advertising by political action committees, or PACs. The Richmond-based group argues it is not a PAC because it would be talking about an issue, not advocating Obama’s defeat or election. […]
“The Supreme Court has recently reaffirmed that you are free to discuss the petitions of candidates on issues and how officials have voted in office without being subject to campaign finance restrictions,” said the organization’s attorney, James Bopp Jr. of Terre Haute, Ind. The high court, in a 5-4 decision last year, upheld a lower court’s ruling that a Wisconsin anti-abortion group should have been allowed to air ads during the final two months before the 2004 election. The Real Truth About Obama wants to post ads on its Web site and on the Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity talk shows in key states during the “electioneering communication” blackout period 60 days before the general election. The ad features an “Obama-like voice” saying he would make taxpayers pay for all abortions, ensure minors’ abortions are concealed from their parents, appoint more liberal Supreme Court justices and legalize the late-term procedure that abortion opponents call “partial-birth” abortion.

What do you suppose an “Obama-like voice” sounds like?

The good news is that John McCain will undoubtedly vociferously disavow any official association with this group. He will do nothing to stop it, but it’s important that we all know that he doesn’t personally believe in negative advertising. He is, after all, a man of deep integrity.

*Disclaimer: nothing in this post should be construed as impugning the character of John McCain‘s whose service in Vietnam still holds us in awe.

Update: Look at this. Can we all agree now that the anti-abortion movement shouldn’t be trusted? Obama should forget trying to fudge this stuff from now on. He should just be clear and make a good argument and the people who are willing to engage in good faith will do so. The rest will just believe the lies because they want to believe the lies.

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Debating Debating

by digby

Harold Pollack, pinch hitting for Ezra, reminds me that I need to call some attention to this must read article by James Fallows about the primary debates.

Pollack focuses on the fact that the debate moderators didn’t bother to ask important, fundamental questions about how government actually works:

Buried deep is a compilation prepared by Sidney Blumenthal and Daniel Freifeld for the Clinton campaign, in which they examined reporters’ questions in 15 debates. As they summarize it:

352 QUESTIONS
29 GOTCHA QUESTIONS
33 PUFF QUESTIONS
7 GOVERNANCE QUESTIONS
NOT A SINGLE QUESTION ABOUT A FEDERAL DEPARTMENT OR AGENCY AND ITS CONDITION UNDER BUSH…

This stuff matters. Both parties are assembling platforms with many new ideas for public policies. Republicans push school vouchers and medical savings accounts. Democrats push charter schools and health reform. During the campaign, we will debate these matters at the 50,000-foot level. At some point, we must confront the elemental reality that an idea is only a good idea when it can be well-executed.

Pollack’s point is well taken. But then there are so many things that weren’t covered in those debates because the moderators ran them as if they were some sort of junior high school sporting event.

Fallows gets into the weeds:

By the time I’d finished watching the debates, I had a similar impression to Blumenthal and Freifeld’s, but with a different organizational scheme. Here is my list of the Five Questions That Should Never Be Asked, with illustrations and reasons why they’re wrong:

1. The will you pledge tonight question, which is always about something no responsible politician could ever flat-out promise to do. For instance, a question to Barack Obama: “Will you pledge that by January 2013, the end of your first term more than five years from now, there will be no U.S. troops in Iraq?” Obama’s reply was the only realistic one: “It’s hard to project four years from now, and I think it would be irresponsible. We don’t know what contingency will be out there.” Hillary Clinton got the same question and gave a similar answer: “I agree with Barack. It is very difficult to know what we’re going to be inheriting. You know, we do not know, walking into the White House in January 2009, what we’re going to find.” The questioner looked as if these were witnesses evading a question. In fact, if they’d said anything different, they’d be indicating that they were too doctrinaire for the job. But that didn’t get Clinton off the hook. “Would you pledge to the American people that Iran will not develop a nuclear bomb while you are president?” she was asked at another debate. She replied, “I intend to do everything I can to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb,” to which the follow-up was: “But you won’t pledge?” Then to Senator Joseph Biden: “Would you pledge to the American people that Iran would not build a nuclear bomb on your watch?” Biden’s reply: “I would pledge to keep us safe.” Taking a pledge would mean news for the show but would either handcuff the politician if elected or create a flip-flop trap later on.

2. The gotcha question, involving any change of policy. A challenge to former Senator John Edwards in a debate last September: “Well, Senator, I want to ask you this because in 2004 when you ran for president, you said we could not afford universal health care, it was not achievable, and it was not responsible. You’ve changed dramatically on this issue.” Edwards’s perfect response: “That’s true, and so has America.” Some changes are suspicious; others reflect a recognition of new facts. The gotcha questioner treats them all the same.

3. The loaded hypothetical question, which assumes factors that can’t be known. One addressed to Hillary Clinton: “If Israel concluded that Iran’s nuclear capability threatened Israel’s security, would Israel be justified in launching an attack on Iran?” She replied, “I think that’s one of those hypotheticals that —” and, over the questioner’s interrupting “It’s not a hypothetical, Senator. It’s real life,” she went on to say “that is better not addressed at this time.” She, Biden, and Obama all challenged a similar hypothetical, straight out of 24, about whether they would torture a captive suspect who knew where a ticking bomb was stashed, saying that in reality torture didn’t work and the scenario was too pat. The most famous combination of the gotcha and the hypothetical was of course the question CNN’s Bernard Shaw asked of Michael Dukakis as the very first in a debate 20 years ago: “Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?”

4. The raise your hand question, for reasons of intellectual vulgarity and personal rudeness; and

5. The lightning round, in which the candidates have 30 seconds to address a point. After aggressive questioning in one debate, the moderator said, “We’re going to take a break and come back with our lightning round — 30 seconds to answer each question.” Senator Chris Dodd shot back, “You never got to the real round.” The transcript then shows: “SENATOR CLINTON: (Chuckles.)”

I think this is correct. but I think you have to change beltway culture before the substance of the debates would change. This is the subject matter these people care about.

Fallows makes the point himself:

Here we come to an awkward fact. The questioner in all the illustrations above, starting with the favorite verse of the Bible, was Tim Russert of NBC. (I called Russert’s office in Washington on a Tuesday to request an interview about his approach to debate questions. I was told that he was in Europe at the time and I should call back the following Monday. In between came the shocking news of his death.)

The generous personality that made Russert so popular, and the encyclopedic political knowledge that made him so influential, meant that he was imitated when he set a bad example as well as a good one. His questioning mode during the debates was mostly unfortunate. In two important, back-to-back Democratic debates last fall—in Hanover, New Hampshire, in September and Philadelphia in October—nearly every question he asked was from the categories above.

The candidates fought back, even when that involved defending their political rivals. A few months earlier, in a June debate in New Hampshire sponsored by CNN, all of the candidates had pushed back harder against the less magisterial Wolf Blitzer. When Blitzer asked for a yes/no show of hands on whether “the United States should use military force to stop the genocide in Darfur,” Clinton asked for details and then refused to answer. “We’re not going to engage in these hypotheticals,” she said. “I mean, one of the jobs of a president is being very reasoned in approaching these issues. And I don’t think it’s useful to be talking in these kind of abstract, hypothetical terms.” The transcript conveys the reaction after he asked for another show of hands and Biden, Edwards, and Clinton complained at once.

[…]

George Stephanopoulos of ABC, who moderated two of the three Democratic debates held on a major network rather than on cable, told me that the reason the debates became so process-oriented was that the policy differences among the main contenders were so small. This was especially true, he said, in the much-criticized final debate of the primaries, in which he and Charles Gibson spent the first 45 minutes grilling Obama and Clinton on “electability” issues like Obama’s failure to wear an American-flag pin in his lapel, before turning to policy matters in the second half. “To the extent that they have relatively small differences over health-care policies, if either one becomes president those would all be subsumed” in negotiations with Congress, he said. “And as to whether originally they were for war in Iraq—that difference had been debated.” The only thing left to discuss and for the party to consider, according to Stephanopoulos, was “which was more electable in November—that was the heart of the issue.”

By that point, and about that debate, he was probably right. When I’d seen this final debate in real time, I’d been outraged by its harsh tone and belated attention to policy matters (including Gibson’s little lecture to the candidates on why capital-gains tax cuts always paid for themselves). When I saw its place in the series, I realized it was like a late episode of The Sopranos in which nearly everyone gets mowed down. It was violent and dehumanizing, but it was the culmination of a long process.

I recall feeling a bit disoriented at the time by the shock and outrage at the ABC debate, not because it wasn’t shocking and outrageous, but because it seemed pretty typical to me. I think I watched all but one of them and I was dumbstruck each time by how horrible they were — and Russert really was the ringleader. From the very beginning, he and Matthews set a tone that was as illuminating as a dying birthday candle.

In fact, back in February I wrote an angry post called “How do we defeat Tim Russert?” in which I said:

From tax returns to Farrakhan to footage shown by “mistake” to the endless, trivial, gotcha bullshit, this debate spectacle tonight was a classic demonstration of what people really hate about politics. It isn’t actually the candidates who can at least on occasion be substantive and serious. The problem is Tim Russert and all his petty, shallow acolytes who spend their time reading Drudge, breathlessly reporting every tabloid tidbit … in lieu of doing any real work.

These people guide the way citizens perceive politics even if the citizens don’t know it. It’s hard for me to see how anything can truly change until this is dealt with.

Russert’s death doesn’t change that. (If anything, his style will probably be venerated as the “gold standard” now that he’s been martyred.) He was a product of beltway culture not the maker of it. This approach to politics will continue as long as DC journalists and columnists allow groupthink and friendships (and yes, careerist impulses) to overrule their integrity. The problem is best illustrated, perhaps, not by the debates themselves, but by the spectacle of these insiders gathering together in the studios to “analyze” them afterwards. You’d be hard pressed to find a more embarrassing group of fawning sycophants even in the crowd lining the red carpet at the Oscars.

I don’t know have the answer to this problem. It’s clearly due, at least in part, to the fact that success is measured by the entertainment model of ratings and advertising dollars. But perhaps it’s the lure of “celebrity” and fame that is most pernicious. There’s something about that which turns even good minds to mush after a while.

I do know that I believe that as basement dwelling, cheeto gobbling bloggers we have no such inducements and should be able to keep a consistent critique of these people. I continue to believe that the political media is a fundamental impediment to progressivism and one of the blogosphere’s primary responsibilities is to keep the heat on these people no matter whether they are pleasing us on a certain day or whether we want to throw our keyboards at the TV. It’s a dirty job but somebody’s got to do it — and if it isn’t us, it will be nobody.

Fallows didn’t see the debates in real time (he was in China) so he was only able to get the full flavor of what was so wrong with them after the fact, seeing them all at once. Very few people wrote about this while it was happening, even in the blogosphere, until Gibson and Stephanopoulos went over the top on Barack and his online supporters lurched into gear. I consider that our failure too (me included — I didn’t make it the kind of focus of my blogging that I should have) and I hope we’ve learned our lesson.

This isn’t about having some people we like on TV or taking down one politician over another in a primary. The system itself is inherently antithetical to the kind of dialog we need to advance liberal politics in this country. We are at a huge disadvantage until we can figure out a way to change it.

Be sure to read dday’s exceptional post below, also on the subject of the media.

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