High Broderists Trot Out 2000 Election Memes
by dday
There is little chance that anyone who pays even a little bit of attention to politics could credibly claim that Barack Obama and John McCain represent similar positions on the major issues of the day. So when McCain advisor Douglas Holtz-Eakin publicly stated that Obama's budget policies would represent a third Bush term because he is “dedicated to the recent Bush tradition of spending money on everything,” it was common to suspect that he would be laughed out of the room, which even Bob Novak took the time out to do.
That is the silliest thing I have ever heard! And I won’t even dignify how stupid it is.
But Holtz-Eakin's comment wasn't meant for partisans and operatives like Novak; it was meant for that segment of the pundit class that floats above everyone in bold, bipartisan glory - the High Broderists, the revered priests of the Village temple, who are certain that the country will right itself and revert to its better nature as soon as all of this messy bickering is set aside and the two parties work together in the spirit of unity and compromise. The mere details of the policies are unimportant; what matters is that people are backslapping one another and laughing and getting along and making Washington a better place. The appeal of McCain's assumed independent streak and Obama's talk about unity and compromise is undeniable, and so it was inevitable that they would take Holtz-Eakin's statement a step further and claim that there is no difference between the leaders of the two major parties on any substantive issue. Here's the foreign policy version of that argument, from Fred Hiatt of the WaPo:
IN THE HEAT of the Democratic primary campaign, some on the left were inspired to believe that Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) offered a far-reaching transformation of U.S. foreign policy, "the most sweeping liberal foreign-policy critique we've heard from a serious presidential contender in decades," as one particularly breathless article in the American Prospect put it. Yet, when Mr. Obama opened his general election campaign this week with a major speech on Middle East policy, the substantive strategy he outlined was, in many respects, not very much different from that of the Bush administration -- or that of Republican Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). That's not a bad thing; rather, it's a demonstration that there is a strong bipartisan consensus about America's vital interests in the Middle East and that the sensible options for defending them are relatively limited [...]
The gap in Mr. Obama's Middle East policy remains Iraq. Mr. Obama has used his opposition to the war to distinguish himself politically from Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and now from Mr. McCain. Yet, in doing so, he has become unreasonably wedded to a year-old proposal to rapidly withdraw all U.S. combat forces from the country -- a plan offered when he wrongly believed that the situation would only worsen as long as American troops remained. Remarkably, only a sentence or two about Iraq appeared in Mr. Obama's AIPAC speech, and advisers say he may visit the country in coming months. That would offer him the opportunity to outline a strategy based on sustaining the dramatic reduction in violence recorded this year. No, the left wouldn't like it, but it would be in keeping with Mr. Obama's pragmatic approach to the rest of the region.
And here's the domestic policy version, from an editorial that, in the print edition of the LA Times, was titled "Obamacain?":
It has been a refrain during the exhausting battle for the Democratic presidential nomination that once Hillary Rodham Clinton or Barack Obama emerged as the party's choice, we could finally dispense with the personality battles and get down to nitty-gritty policy differences. Indeed, now that Obama seems to have the position locked up, he and presumptive Republican nominee John McCain will have plenty to argue about. But some might be surprised at the breadth of issues on which they largely agree.
On McCain's side, this is understandable. With a Republican president experiencing some of the worst approval ratings ever, it's no shock that the party opted for an unusually centrist candidate. Yet Obama, too, represents a break from Democratic orthodoxy and is reaching out to the middle. This could indicate that on certain policies, something like a national consensus is developing. It at least signals a lessening of the partisan divide that has blocked progress on important changes.
As Matt Yglesias notes, this is completely absurd. On the major policy issues of the day, on Iraq, on health care, on taxes, on diplomacy, and on hundreds more, Obama and McCain couldn't be more different. On other issues where McCain has sought distance from party orthodoxy in the past, like immigration or warrantless spying or torture, he's walked back that significantly to the point that his stance is a complete muddle.
But of course, that's not really what this is about. In 2000 we had a pair of candidates that were substantially different on major issues, and yet most media accounts of the race intoned that they were completely in sync and that the contest would be played out as a battle of personalities. Then-Gov. Bush did nothing but hide those substantial differences and present an image as a compassionate conservative and a uniter, not a divider, and the Village's high priests wouldn't deign to actually analyze the policies and positions the candidates took, so they merely nodded sagely in assent. This is the same phenomenon. Because laziness is the hallmark of a modern journalist, and there's a stated agenda of bridging the partisan divide, the editoralists mistake the candidates' rhetoric for action, and pronounce them substantively similar. This makes it easier for media types to focus on trivialities and nonsense instead of the effects of those markedly different policies.
This is not the speech of a guy who has the same views on the economy as John McCain or George Bush:
But when it comes to the economy, John McCain and I have a fundamentally different vision of where to take the country. Because for all his talk of independence, the centerpiece of his economic plan amounts to a full-throated endorsement of George Bush's policies. He says we've made "great progress" in our economy these past eight years. He calls himself a fiscal conservative and on the campaign trail he's passionate critic of government spending, and yet he has no problem spending hundreds of billions of dollars on tax breaks for big corporations and a permanent occupation of Iraq - policies that have left our children with a mountain of debt.
George Bush's policies have taken us from a projected $5.6 trillion dollar surplus at the end of the Clinton Administration to massive deficits and nearly four trillion dollars in new debt today. We were promised a fiscal conservative. Instead, we got the most fiscally irresponsible administration in history. And now John McCain wants to give us another. Well we've been there once, and we're not going back. It's time to move this country forward.
I have a different vision for the future. Instead of spending twelve billion dollars a month to rebuild Iraq, I think it's time we invested in our roads and schools and bridges and started to rebuild America. Instead of handing out giveaways to corporations that don't need them and didn't ask for them, it's time we started giving a hand-up to families who are trying pay their medical bills and send their children to college. We can't afford four more years of skewed priorities that give us nothing but record debt - we need change that works for the American people. And that is the choice in this election.
I think these editorials were more like trial balloons, and expressions of personal bias - in Hiatt's case an opportunity to try and wash the blood of his cheerleading for the Iraq debacle, in the LAT's case an opportunity to push their unity hobby-horse. But it's inevitable that a modern media so uninterested in policy would allow themselves to be effectively spun by campaign advisors, blur the very defined lines between Democrats and Republicans and essentially give themselves a free pass to continue making a mockery of campaign journalism.
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