The weariness factor
by Tom Sullivan
Combined with relentless propaganda from right-wing TV and radio, the "fake news" mantra of the duffer-in-chief has helped polarize and numb the citizenry to facts in ways that are a threat to the republic. So, it might be wise to review Thomas Jefferson's take on the importance of an informed citizenry in context:
Our new constitution, of which you speak also, has succeeded beyond what I apprehended it would have done. I did not at first believe that 11. states out of 13. would have consented to a plan consolidating them so much into one. A change in their dispositions, which had taken place since I left them, had rendered this consolidation necessary, that is to say, had called for a federal government which could walk upon it’s own legs, without leaning for support on the state legislatures. A sense of this necessity, and a submission to it, is to me a new and consolatory proof that wherever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.
A jaundiced viewer surveying on our present situation might wonder whether those who believe they should rule are deliberately creating a disinformation environment where the people can neither be trusted with governing nor set things right.
Digby last night reviewed Margaret Sullivan's Washington Post column about her listening tour of upstate New York. She wanted to glean the perspective on the media outside the Beltway. Sullivan found people have tired of talking heads panels brought in to analyze minor developments and fill time on 24-hour cable. After a while, it was just "people's ideas and a lot of people arguing," one person told her. "You're not always getting the whole story," said another. "I wish the bickering would stop," said a third.
It is that weariness that Senator-elect Doug Jones used to win his race in Alabama earlier this month. Jones' chief media strategist Joe Trippi told Ezra Klein the race was a dead heat from start to finish. But their central insight was voters "already exhausted by the chaos and hostility of Trump’s Washington" were open to an alternative that brought back a modicum of stability. Roy Moore, the law defying, gun-toting cowboy twice removed from the Alabama Supreme Court was more chaos.
Trippi said on The Ezra Klein Show (transcript at Vox):
I think Trump, even with his own supporters who like him, has created enough hostility and chaos that voters don't want more of it. They can tolerate it with him, but they don't want more. I think there is an almost infinite hunger in the country right now for ending the division, the hatred, the hate talk.
Although she was surveying people's attitude towards the news, Sullivan's experience listening to people she met near Buffalo offers some support for Trippi's assessment. The campaign's path to winning came though not inflaming passions, but calming them. The Washington Post's allegations of child molestation by Roy Moore hurt him, but Jones could have won without them. The Post story actually worked against Jones, Trippi said:
The key to us having a chance was to detribalize the politics of the state. If Alabama was reacting to the tribal politics of our times, there was no way for us to win. And in a weird way, the allegations created tribalism again. You either believe the charges or you don't believe the charges. Suddenly, we're back into Republicans who don't believe the charges; it's the media out to get Roy Moore. He's able to start tribalizing the race. Trump begins coming in with him. And every time that happened, Roy Moore would open a lead.
Yet Jones did not run as a conservative Democrat as others do in southern states. He is pro-choice and wasn't going to back away from that position. Then again, he didn't broadcast his progressivism, Klein observed. Trippi explained:
He's the kind of person that would go out and say, "We don't agree. Let me explain to you why I'm where I'm at, and why I think we should try to find a way for us to get to some middle ground on this." Now they could reject that. And Doug Jones was a realist. If that's why he got rejected, he could live with that.
I actually think we got a lot of people voting for us because people knew where he stood. They believed him. So then if he says he wants to reach common ground, then maybe he really does. I think there was an authenticity to him, and a credibility to him, that Moore didn't have.
The question is do Democrats win in 2018 by turning up the temperature or by turning it down? Trippi tells Klein:
I think the big question mark in our heads as we were arguing for common ground was what do rank-and-file Democrats do when they see this? Do we somehow deenergize those people who really are appalled by what's going on with Trump? Again, we're monitoring everything, and what happened was Republican women started to move to us, younger Republicans started to move to us, and the intensity among Democrats didn't diminish; in fact, over time, it kept building and building.
Plus, Jones' track record in prosecuting the Klan didn't hurt with black voters in Alabama. Neither did having an opponent like Roy Moore.
Trippi's assessment may apply only to this unique race in Alabama. Then again, it worked in Alabama. I could throw a stone here and hit plenty of progressives activists primed to campaign further and more in-your-face to the left in 2018. If the DCCC and the DSCC are true to form, they will read Trippi's analysis as supporting recruitment of more centrist Blue Dogs, despite the fact they could not weather the storms of 2010 and 2014. If voters want Republicans, they'll vote for the real deal over Republican-lite.
But Jones may have walked a path of calm honesty — not backing away from progressive stands and pivoting to the middle — for which there is hidden demand. Just as Margaret Sullivan found a hunger for "fairness, depth, and accuracy" outside the media crucible where controversy sells soap.
Trump fed people what many were hungry for. Jones' win in Alabama suggests maybe they've already had their fill.
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