Disqualifying narrative
by digby
So everybody’s pretty well writing Iowa off now, which is too bad:
Just three days before Election Day, Republican Joni Ernst has surged to a 7-point lead in the final Des Moines Register poll of the hotly contested U.S. Senate race in Iowa.
Ernst broke the critical majority threshold in the survey, winning 51 percent to Democrat Bruce Braley’s 44 percent among likely voters, outside the margin of error of plus-or-minus 3.7 percentage points.
I guess we’ll find out in a few hours.
Joni Ernst is right up there with Sharron Angle for Tea partying lunacy but since the Republicans got in there to shape her campaign they’ve managed to keep that under wraps. And I have to agree with Norm Ornstein about why:
Those who follow election coverage in the Post would know something more about Ernst’s opponent, Democratic Representative Bruce Braley. They might know two things, actually, neither of them related to his record in Congress or his positions on vital issues: that Braley and his wife have had run-ins with a neighbor over the neighbor’s chickens coming onto their property, and that Michelle Obama, on a campaign visit for Braley, referred to him as “Bruce Bailey.”
There were no stories saying that references to Agenda 21 might be “disqualifiying.”
A Nexis search shows that the Post has had four references to Ernst and Agenda 21—all by Greg Sargent on his blog from the left, The Plum Line, and none on the news pages of the paper. But there have been dozens of references to Braley’s spat over the neighbor’s chickens, including a front-page story. The New York Times had zero references to Ernst and Agenda 21, but seven, including in a Gail Collins column, to Braley and chickens. The Post did have a fact-check column by Glenn Kessler devoted to the Cotton claims on Mexican drug lords and ISIS terrorists—Cotton did not fare well—but no news stories. The Times did not mention it at all.
Of course, this does not mean that the press has a Republican bias, any more than it had an inherent Democratic bias in 2012 when Akin, Angle, and Mourdock led the coverage. What it suggests is how deeply the eagerness to pick a narrative and stick with it, and to resist stories that contradict the narrative, is embedded in the culture of campaign journalism. The alternative theory, that the Republican establishment won by surrendering its ground to its more ideologically extreme faction, picking candidates who are folksy and have great resumes but whose issue stances are much the same as their radical Tea Party rivals, goes mostly ignored. Meanwhile, there was plenty of coverage of the admittedly bonehead refusal by Kentucky Democratic Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes to say she had voted for Obama—dozens of press references to NBC’s Chuck Todd saying it was “disqualifying”—but no stories saying that references to Agenda 21 or talking about terrorists and drug lords out to kill Arkansans were disqualifying.
Cynical gasbags and Villagers have always loved to mock bloggers and their ilk for their obsession with MSM “narrative” but now that Norm Ornstein’s taken it up maybe they’ll give it some thought. He’s right.
All you have to do is think about the fact hat the host of Meet The Press said it was disqualifying for Alison Lundgren Grimes to dodge the question of whether she voted for Obama while nobody gave a damn that Joni Ernst is an unreconstructed wingnut conspiracy theorist. It wasn’t “nutty Republican” year — they’re tired of that theme and they hate it when the Republicans say they’re in the tank. This year it was “the grown-ups are back” and “everyone hates Obama.” There was no escaping it.
It’s probably the case that the Senate would have changed hands anyway. But it’s less likely that a full blown nutball like Ernst would have become a US Senator. We’ve already got enough of them from the deep red states. Iowa should at least produce a semi-sane Republican.
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