The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports that Rick Goddard, a retired Air Force major general running against conservative Dem Congressman Jim Marshall, referred in a radio appearance to “a very uppity newscaster” who had a testy TV exchange with Newt Gingrich at the Republican Convention. This appeared to be a reference to MSNBC reporter Ron Allen, who is black.
The Goddard campaign didn’t deny that he was discussing Ron Allen, telling the Journal-Constitution that Goddard “simply evoked a word — that by definition — described the reporter’s demeanor as being superior, arrogant and presumptuous.”
This comes after Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA) told The Hill that he believed both Barack and Michelle Obama were “uppity,” then denied that there was any racial connotation to the word.
There is more to this than simply pissing off liberals and reminding African Americans that Strange Fruit awaits those get too uppity.
The effect is to simultaneously expand the language the right can use while shutting up those who oppose the right. A Republican called Clinton a “bitch” and John McCain snickered. A Republican called herself a violent bitch and an entire convention roared in approval. Imagine the uproar if the situation was reversed. Imagine if I had written that Secretary State Rice was getting uppity in an interview. Imagine the press frenzy if I asked Obama or Biden, “how can we get that nasty bitch?” at a campaign rally.
Republicans feel no compunction about using racist language – no, not racist code words, racist language – while objecting furiously if Barack Obama warns his audience that they will be doing just that.
Because of the way conservatives constructed the playing field, and no one jumped all over them in time to stop it, liberals aren’t allowed even to use common phrases like “lipstick on a pig” to describe an opponent’s plans. But describing blacks as “uppity” is fair fame.
At the risk of losing my temper at some decent, honest commenters, this is the reason why Democrats should have jumped all over the convention the Friday afterwards and said loudly and clearly that they were perfectly happy to have Sarah Palin call herself a violent bitch and would honor her self-description by repeating it again and again and showing how, in oh so many ways, she was telling the truth. This is why you never, ever, let a Republican dominate a news cycle or set the terms of a rhetorical encounter. This is why every lie and distortion must be treated to a loud howl especially when our side misses the point or an opportunity to attack. This is why the race is a nailbiter.
Folks, we are way beyond the gentle wordplay of Alice and her Humpty Dumpty, despite his obvious visual likeness to so many GOP delegates. This is a war in which one side, ours, is being deliberately and systematically disarmed. How many times does this exact same scenario have to play out, before Democrats get it?
…today McCain comes out with this rancid, race-baiting ad based on another lie. Willie Horton looks mild by comparison. (And remember, President George H.W. Bush never ran the Willie Horton ad himself. It was an outside group. He wasn’t willing to degrade himself that far.) As TPM Reader JM said below, at least Horton actually was released on a furlough. This is ugly stuff. And this is an ugly person. There’s clearly no level of sleaze this guy won’t stoop to to win this election.
And let’s be frank. He might win it. This is clearly a testing time for Obama supporters.
Indeed it is. And staying above the fray fails the test. It is time for donkeys to kick ass. Hard.
Following up on dday’s post below about the impending Pig ‘n Lipstick hissy fit, I thought this was an interesting column about the newfound Republican commitment to feminism. They are obviously sleazy, dishonest hypocrites who have no principles whatsoever. But we knew that. Double standards are the only standards they have.
I can’t help but be reminded of this gambit from 2004. John Kerry was asked this question at the debate:
Both of you are opposed to gay marriage. But to understand how you have come to that conclusion, I want to ask you a more basic question. Do you believe homosexuality is a choice?
Kerry answered this way:
“We’re all God’s children, Bob. And I think if you were to talk to Dick Cheney’s daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she’s being who she was, she’s being who she was born as.”
Now, Mary Cheney was an out lesbian in a long term relationship, which Dick had acknowledged in the debate in 2000. It was not a secret. But a royal hissy fit ensued, led by Lynn Cheney the next day on the campaign trail:
“The only thing I could conclude is that this is not a good man. This is not a good man. And, of course, I’m speaking as a mom. And a pretty indignant one. This is not a good man. What a cheap and tawdry political trick.”
Recipe for a hissy: You have an openly gay daughter who, by all accounts, you love and have accepted without judgment. But when someone asks your political opponent if he believes people like her are born the way they are and he mentions her as someone who would back up his contention that they are, you rend your garments and shriek that he is “not a good man!” Your hypocritical followers, most of whom ostensibly believe homosexuality is a sin and want to force people like your daughter to live a lie, cheer wildly, not even questioning why you aren’t denying what he said. And that is because they know the truth, or if they don’t, they prefer to stay in the dark so they can keep their tribal solidarity undisturbed. Talk about a cheap and tawdry political trick.
This is how these things go and they are very difficult to counter once they get going. (The General Betrayus ad was a more recent example.)They’re tough to counter, even though they make no sense and are often just purely silly. The press loves them and they end up becoming such a distraction that the Dems finally conclude that it’s not worth it to fight them. So they concede. And then they look like weenies.
Update:via Julia, here’s some of that principled GOP feminism in action:
“The Republican Party will not stand by while Gov. Palin is subjected to sexist attacks,” said Carly Fiorina, a McCain aide who formerly headed Hewlett-Packard. “I don’t believe American women are going to stand for it either.”
Asked why they didn’t stand up in defense of Clinton during the primary campaign, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), turned the question back on the media. “Had we been more vocal, you all would have chosen not to report it,” she said.
Blackburn, the first woman to represent Tennessee’s 23rd Senate district — and since 2002 holder of Tennessee’s Seventh Congressional District seat — knows well the self-restraint and stamina required for a woman to run a successful campaign amidst a male-dominated profession.
Blackburn said she was surprised by Clinton’s negative response to heavy criticism from opponents and noted that “part of the discretion of serving in leadership is knowing when to bite your tongue.”
[…]
Blackburn, communications chairman for the Republican Study Committee, recognizes that, while gender is a factor due to public perception, it’s not something to focus on.
“For women to achieve as men achieve, we have to realize we have to be smarter, think faster, work harder,” said Blackburn. “A term that I use a lot is — leadership is not as it appears, but as it performs.”
She said that while leadership can be assigned, the action required to lead is earned — and when it comes to “piling on” — she said, “sometimes you have to hold your tongue and work your way through it.”
So far, I haven’t read anyone who’s noticed that McCain played the race card in his filthy lying ad about Obama and sex education. But he most certainly did. Anyway…
Of course it isn’t true that Obama wants to teach kids about sex before they learn to read. This country should be so lucky. But then, Obama’s a moderate.
We liberals welcome early education on human sexuality. My daughter could barely read when they started sex education in her school. Fine with me. And her parents have also had many conversations with her to explain things that were confusing. By the time she’s sexually active, she will be very familiar with important information about contraception. This is in sharp contrast to the teen daughters of christianist parents who, having been taught abstinence-only and receiving no organized, accurate information about condoms, pills, diaphragms, and so on, find themselves, much to their dismay, pregnant. And are then coerced into giving birth before they are mature enough to raise a child.
Liberals believe in contraception for teenagers. Moderates don’t want to discuss it. Conservatives, fearfully clutching their pearls when the word “sex” is pronounced, are disgusted by the entire subject.
Sure enough, since this country is ruled by a conservative and is scared stiff of dealing with sexual topics in anything resembling a responsible manner, the US has one of the highest, if not the highest, rate of teen pregnancy in the industrialized world. And despite the unique exceptions in our own lives we celebrate, conservatives, moderates and liberals all agree that pregnancy by immature teenagers is a serious problem (even if conservatives conveniently forget that it is when it becomes politically expedient to do so).
In truth, we pay an enormous price, both in terms of human potential and in real dollars, because conservatives like McCain, Bush, and Palin won’t support comprehensive sex education. I’ll leave you with the Obama campaign’s superb response to McCain’s sick ad:
“It is shameful and downright perverse for the McCain campaign to use a bill that was written to protect young children from sexual predators as a recycled and discredited political attack against a father of two young girls – a position that his friend Mitt Romney also holds. Last week, John McCain told Time magazine he couldn’t define what honor was. Now we know why.”
So here’s what the traditional media is going to be talking about for the next day. Be prepared for it. It’s too stupid for them to ignore.
Today at an event in Virginia, Barack Obama mocked the McCain-Palin ticket’s notion that they will change Washington. He didn’t refer specifically to Gov. Palin, he didn’t refer to the line she used in her convention speech about hockey moms and pit bulls. He simply used a common idiom.
“That’s not change,” Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., said of what Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is offering. “You know, you can put lipstick on a pig,” Obama said, “but it’s still a pig.”
The McCain campaign is going to try to frame this as a sexist remark.
Jake Tapper decided to make the connection for everyone, no doubt prodded by the McCain spin machine. He specifically connected the “lipstick on a pig” remark to Palin, despite it being an expression. Later in the same riff, Obama says that “You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called ‘change,’ but it’s still gonna stink after eight years.” Is that anti-marine life?
Ben Smith picked up on this too, claiming that “The crowd apparently took the “lipstick” line as a reference to Palin,” because I’m sure he asked them all. The crowd certainly wasn’t cheering simply because it was an accurate line, that McCain and Palin are a couple of liars, and that’s a common phrase used to show someone trying to put a veneer over their true beliefs. Marc Ambinder has pushed back a bit on this, asking incredulously, “Suddenly, common analogies are sexist?” He also found instances of Obama using the phrase in other contexts. And there’s also this:
McCain criticized Democratic contenders for offering what he called costly universal health-care proposals that require too much government regulation. While he said he had not studied Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s plan, he said it was “eerily reminiscent” of the failed plan she offered as first lady in the 1990s.
“I think they put some lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig,” he said of her proposal.
There’s no doubt that this is going to turn into some giant controversy, despite it being COMPLETELY MANUFACTURED. Believe me, if there was a sexist remark made by Obama or one of his surrogates, I’d be the first person to jump on it. We have to protect women running for public office from being put on an unlevel playing field, and I’m very disappointed that far too many liberals seem to not understand this.
But this is ridiculous. And the newfound Republican guardians of feminism, the ones who spent the spring selling Hillary nutcrackers and Citizens United Not Timid T-shirts, are somewhat less than credible.
The McCain campaign has no honor and no shame, and they will try to ram this down everyone’s throat. The goal here ought to be letting the traditional media know, from a grassroots level, that they ought to give this exactly the attention it deserves, which is none. But, this is a tailor-made manufactured story for the daytime talking heads to cackle over.
“I hear all this talk about how the Republicans are going to work in dealing with parents who have both the joy…and the difficulty of raising a child who has a developmental disability, who were born with a birth defect,” he said. “Well, guess what folks? If you care about it, why don’t you support stem cell research?”
It would be nice to think this is a prelude to the Dems taking on the Republican War on Science, but my guess is that while global warming may come up, evolution never will be.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has decided that Sen. Joe Lieberman (ID-Conn.) — one of Republican presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) top supporters — can no longer attend Democrats’ weekly caucus lunches or the biweekly chairmen’s lunches used to formulate policy, senior Democratic aides said Tuesday.
The decision comes in the wake of Lieberman’s attacks on Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) at the GOP convention last week, and essentially formalizes a deal Reid and Lieberman had cut earlier this year under which Lieberman would not attend meetings that included discussions of sensitive campaign or political issues.
Lieberman for weeks has voluntarily forgone the weekly caucus lunches and weekly policy lunches on Thursdays.
Oh snap! He’s been formally told not to attend Democratic meetings where campaign strategy is being formulated against the man Lieberman just enthusiastically endorsed at the Republican convention. He must be devastated.
We’re finally getting around in the larger blogosphere to something I was flogging a few weeks ago – how the media is failing to apply the same standard to John McCain that they did to Al Gore in 2000.
It’s completely clear that the McCain campaign is outright lying about Sarah Palin’s opposition to the bridge to nowhere. It’s almost comical how many news stories have debunked it (here’s a pretty thorough list). And the Obama campaign is not being passive about it, either. Not in any way.
On the same day that dozens of news organizations have exposed Governor Palin’s phony Bridge to Nowhere claim as a ‘naked lie,’ she and John McCain continue to repeat the claim in their stump speeches. Maybe tomorrow she’ll tell us she sold it on eBay,” said Obama campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor.
And this is only one of a host of lies that McCain and Palin have uttered on the stump and in interviews. McCain, who has abandoned virtually every “maverick” instinct he’s ever had, just yesterday blasted Obama for wanting to cancel a weapons system that he himself opposed just a few years ago. This has happened multiple times and it’s not going to stop. In fact, Palin is STILL saying that she opposed the bridge to nowhere on the campaign trail. She’s lied about it at least 23 times.
It’s not going to stop because the media has not exacted a price for all the lying. They haven’t built a “serial liar” narrative around John McCain the way they did around Al Gore, despite there being far more cause for one in this case. This is what Matt Yglesias was getting at yesterday with Marc Ambinder’s blithely ignorant post wondering why the electorate doesn’t penalize campaigns for lying. Yglesias correctly stated that the media doesn’t penalize the campaigns, so why should the electorate, who’s getting their cues from that same media? One-off stories debunking the lies are nice, but an overall narrative – which does exist – is the only thing that would do the trick in this case. In response, Ambinder said this:
…it must somehow be the press’s fault that John McCain is enjoying a post-convention something-or-other because Americans don’t realize that he’s a lying liar, or whatever, […] To move to a Greenwaldian debate about the duties, obligations and frustrations of the press — well — read elsewhere if you want to play that game. I’ll abstain.
Ambinder is playing the conventional journalist’s game of failing to recognize that the media is part of the story of campaigns. It’s inescapable that they are the filter through which candidates must get out their message. And the hands-off approach they take, their unwillingness to referee on the side of the truth, hurts America.
If everyone got a newspaper once a day, and there were eight political stories, and all of them were different each day, and one of them had pointed out that Palin actually did support the Bridge to Nowhere, then the press would indeed have done its job. The job was to report the story, and they reported it.
But cable news and blogs and radio sort of changed all that and now there’s too much information, and so consumers largely rely on the press to arrange that information into some sort of coherent story that will allow them to understand the election. And the press assumed that role — they didn’t create some new institution, or demand that the cable channels be credentialed differently and understood as “political entertainment.”
They fill this new role through the methods storytellers have always used to tell stories: the repetition of certain key themes and characters, which creates continuity between one day’s events and the next and helps the audience understand which parts to pay attention to […] This requires deciding what matters. And on this, people have different opinions. Take the Bridge to Nowhere, which Ambinder mentions in his post. I think it’s important that one of the central arguments the McCain campaign is making for Palin is a lie. I think that should be reported a lot, at least as often as the McCain campaign repeats it, and then if the McCain campaign doesn’t stop repeating it, their lying should be emphasized a lot, because that’s also important. On the level of first order principles, I know the press agrees with me, because they did this with John Kerry. The crucial problem in this discussion comes here: The press isn’t allow to admit that they construct these narratives at all, and so can’t transparently justify why they choose to use one and not another. Which creates mistrust and anger.
In a similar way, the press can’t report that their corporate overseers play a significant role in shaping the news that we see. If you don’t believe that, look at the MSNBC situation from yesterday. It’s a cable network with a corporate parent that has found a niche generating cable news with a nominally liberal perspective, but it conflicts with the perceived rights and repsonsibilities of the corporate parent, so they must act against their financial interest and squash the nominal liberal perspective.
So they tie their own hands about a fundamental part of the campaign, something that really shapes public opinion on a variety of subjects. It really comes down to whether or not the grand poohbahs of the chattering class like the candidate. Glenn Greenwald weighs in on this.
It isn’t particularly surprising that journalists view debates over their “duties and obligations” as sanctimonious, worthless, boring irritants — a frivolous little “game” that is the last thing they’re going to indulge. After all, they have campaign planes to catch, Steve Schmidt gossip to be dished along, petty scoops to uncover, and the daily drama of the election to be dissected. They’re not going to be sidetracked from those fun and exciting pursuits by haughty objections from interlopers about the destructive role they’re playing in our elections, or by ponderous debates from non-members about their so-called “obligations” to scrutinize candidates’ claims and expose the falsehoods of political leaders. Please.
I do think that Democratic operatives embedded in the media, what few there are, have started to catch on to this, and maybe a constant haranguing can bring us to some kind of reckoning. Paul Begala does a good job here.
ROBERTS: That would appear, Paul, to end any argument over whether or not she supported the bridge initially. But why can’t Barack Obama make that point stick?
PAUL BEGALA, CNN POLITICAL CONTRIBUTOR: Because the press won’t do its job, John. I criticized Barack Obama when he hasn’t been tough enough. Barack’s job is to run against John McCain, right. Don’t shoot the monkey when you can shoot for the organ grinder. His job is not to focus on number two but number one. But it is the media’s job when a politician flat out lies like she’s doing on this bridge to nowhere so call her on it. Or this matter of earmarks where she’s attacking Barack Obama for having earmarks, when she was the mayor of little Wasilla, Alaska, 6,000 people, she hired a lobbyist who was connected to Jack Abramoff, who is a criminal and they brought home $27 million in earmarks. She carried so much pork home she got trichinosis. But we in the media are letting her tell lies about her record.
ROBERTS: Hey, OK. We got to let Alex respond to that. Flat out lies, Alex?
ALEX CASTELLANOS, CNN POLITICAL CONTRIBUTOR: Let’s be a little gentle. Look, every elected official in this country works under the system we have, which is you try to get a little bit of your tax money back. You just don’t want to leave it all in Washington. The amazing thing about Sarah Palin is when she became governor she actually stood up and said no. And she made it –
BEGALA: That’s not true.
CASTELLANOS: She took a strong stand. That is rare and that never happened.
ROBERTS: All right.
BEGALA: That’s just not true. You know, John, the facts matter. There’s lots of things that are debatable who is more qualified or less experienced or more this or more passionate, whatever. It is a fact that she campaigned and supported that bridge to nowhere. It is a fact that she hired lobbyists to get earmarks. It is a fact that as governor she lobbies for earmarks. Her state is essentially a welfare state taking money from the federal government.
ROBERTS: We still have 56 days to talk about this back and forth.
BEGALA: This is the problem. We have this false debate when we ought to have at least agreed upon facts.
There is going to be a lot of resistance to this. The Village establishment couldn’t dare see themselves as biased arbiters and swayers of public opinion. They’re just going to have to be called out. Repeatedly.
Barack Obama competed against himself Monday with interviews airing simultaneously on two different networks. They might as well have been two different galaxies.The Democrat waded into cable TV’s blood feud, between Keith Olbermann of MSNBC and Bill O’Reilly of Fox News Channel, becoming as much a bit player as any even-odds presidential candidate can be.In one interview Obama had to fight — not always successfully — to keep from being shouted down. In the other he couldn’t succeed in keeping a straight face at the ease of the softballs tossed at him.We’ll leave you to guess which is which.[…] The Fox host complained that Obama wanted “50 percent of my success.” They fought briefly over numbers, and Obama said to O’Reilly, “you can afford that.” O’Reilly said Obama’s plans would promote class warfare. He called him “Robin Hood Obama” and said his tax plan was a “socialist tenet.””If I’m sitting pretty and you’ve got a waitress who is making minimum wage plus tips, and I can afford it and she can’t, what’s the big deal for me to say I’m going to pay a little more?” Obama said. “That’s neighborliness.”O’Reilly said he and others he knew would be be making less stock transfers if the Obama tax plan went through. “It’s going to come back and haunt you, senator,” O’Reilly said.It was a much different atmosphere at the MSNBC studio in Rockefeller Center. Olbermann interviewed Obama campaign on Monday and will run it in two parts with the second one on Tuesday.[…] He praised Obama for his use of the word “enough” in his convention acceptance speech and wondered why the Republicans, in his words, were having success muddying the waters of the campaign.”The Republicans cannot always govern, but they run very smart campaigns,” Obama said.
I’d leave out the “always” but it’s a good line. They don’t call ’em Mayberry Machiavellis for nothing. It sounds to me as if he did fine with the Falafel King. There’s really not much you can say to someone who insists that his fantasy of fabulously wealthy people not making stock transfers to avoid paying a higher tax rate is going to “haunt” the next president. The ghost of Ronald Reagan’s speech writer has much bigger fish to fry.
The Obama campaign needs money, lots of it, right now. So please give.
If you want to try to increase liberal/progressive leverage over the Democratic party, I would strongly suggest that you funnel your donation through something like this.