How our media fuels cynicism

The morning after the election I was talking to my neighbor who is a retired truck driver. He told me that he didn't bother to vote anymore because none of "them" ever did what they promised to do when campaigning. Sure...he's a sample of one. But I think he's pretty representative of the 2/3 of voters who didn't show up Tuesday. In other words, McConnell's strategy of sowing cynicism is a pretty smart move for Republicans (and a disaster for democracy).

I expect those who believe that politics is all just a power game (i.e., McConnell) to play the best hand they've got. Someone as smart as he is knows that the public at large doesn't buy their solutions (see: the success of minimum wage referendum). So he's got to come up with a way to win elections in spite of that.

The folks I DO hold accountable for the spread of this kind of cynicism are those in the media. The reason my neighbor doesn't think that elected officials ever follow through is because they are fed massive doses of hysteria every day with almost zero coverage of results.

This phenomenon was actually heightened in the lead-up to the midterm elections where the American public was fed a steady stream of fear-mongering about one "crisis" after another. But how much are they hearing about how President Obama's responses are working? Nada...zilch...zero.

For example, you have to dig deep to learn that the Russian economy is tanking, partly as a result of the President's work to partner with European countries on sanctions following their incursion into Ukraine. Or how about the fact that the ISIS Wave of Might is Turning into a Ripple? Who noticed that - as of yesterday - Dallas is Ebola free? I personally found it fascinating that, after being consumed with the topic of Ebola for the entire month of October, not one member of the White House Press Corp asked a question about it during President Obama's press conference the day after the election.

To put this in perspective, its interesting to imagine how our current media might have handled the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. I'm sure they'd first of all write countless articles about how President Kennedy was to blame because of his "weakness" as a foreign policy leader. Then they would play up all the possible horror stories on what a nuclear-armed Cuba would do. Some of that surely happened back then. But the difference would be that once everyone was in a frenzy, they'd stop talking about it and move on to some other crisis...ignoring how it was resolved.

I'm not one that buys conspiracy theories about why the media does this. I think its fairly obvious that they exist in a bubble of groupthink that prizes cynicism above all else and are dependent on hysteria to provide eyeballs and link bait for their financial survival.

But this is a deeply disturbing trend that requires our attention. I don't hold out much hope that we can rely on the media to fix this. Its going to eventually be up to us to demand something better.

Democrats: Now is NOT the time to abandon the Obama coalition!

Any pundit who attempts to comment on our current political climate while ignoring the role of race and racism is simply blind - most likely by their own white privilege. While I have had some issues with his approach lately, Tim Wise nailed it a few years ago when he talked about the current "perfect storm" for white anxiety.


To ignore that is to miss a big part of the picture. The factors Wise outlines are exactly why we are currently living in - as Rev. Barber articulated - a Third Reconstruction. That struggle isn't limited to the battle over voting rights. It is also captured by things like the nativism that has been stirred up over immigration reform and the tension that is building between law enforcement and communities of color (i.e., Ferguson). 
Today I woke up to a story about how that is playing out in my own community. Yesterday, the local ABC affiliate in the Twin Cities ran a story titled: Mpls Mayor Flashes Gang Sign with Convicted Felon; Law Enforcement Outraged. 

As it turns out - this "convicted felon" is not a gang member, but has a job working as a canvasser for a local GOTV organization while he is on probation. He and the Mayor were celebrating their door-knocking work last weekend by pointing at each other. KSTP (the local ABC affiliate) was quite clear that they based their story on the "outrage" of law enforcement - who just so happen to be fighting the Mayor on the reforms she is proposing to the Minneapolis Police Department to end disparities. 

So the back story is that law enforcement thought they could discredit the Mayor by tapping into the racist idea that she is convorting with (black) criminal gang members. One officer in the clip of the newscast that I linked to above even goes so far as to ask "Is she going to support gangs or us?"

But folks are fighting back. If you want to see how, just check out the twitter hashtag #pointergate - the story is going national.

In conclusion, the point I want to make with all of this is that lots of pundits and political strategists are in the process of suggesting that - as a result of the midterm losses - Democrats should abandon Obama's efforts to expand the electorate and instead focus on how they can win support from southern white working class voters. I read that as: "Standing up for civil rights is not going well with white voters, so its time to abandon that one." You can FOR SURE count me out on that idea!!!!

Chris Matthews proves himself to be a political idiot (updated)

Just take a look at this nonsense from the supposedly "liberal" MSNBC.


First of all, he says that President Obama isn't going to do anything to stop businesses from illegal hiring. Ummm, Chris - perhaps you didn't notice.

"ICE will focus its resources within the worksite enforcement program on the criminal prosecution of employers who knowingly hire illegal workers in order to target the root cause of illegal immigration," Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano said in April 2009.

The change was dramatic: the number of I-9 audits soared from 503 in 2008 to more than 8,000 in 2009.

Then he talks about the "two ships passing in the night:" those who want to stop illegal immigration and those who want to give current undocumented workers a pathway to citizenship. What he failed to mention is that President Obama and Democrats compromised with Republicans and included both heightened border security AND a pathway to citizenship in the bill that passed the Senate.

Over and over again, President Obama has promised that if the House wouldn't take up that compromise, he would do what he can on the issue of deportations - the one area he feels he has legal authority to act alone. That still doesn't provide a pathway to citizenship, but it will provide some relief to otherwise law abiding immigrants who live in fear of deportation.

If Matthews actually understood what "Hardball" means, he would recognize that this was a hardball tactic employed by the President: either pass the compromise or I'll do something you REALLY won't like. Republicans in the House remained intransigent. So now President Obama is going to follow through on his promise to act alone. Several times in his news conference yesterday the President said that all Republicans would have to do to nullify his action would be to pass some version of a compromise on immigration reform.

But now Matthews is railing at the President for failing to compromise. YIKES...what an idiot!!!

UPDATE: Matthews also seems to be ignorant of this reality:

More than 60 percent of Americans back a pathway to citizenship for immigrants living here illegally — winning support from majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents, according to a sweeping new poll to be released Tuesday.

When it comes to undocumented immigrants, 62 percent of Americans believe they should be allowed to gain citizenship if they meet certain requirements, while 17 percent would support green cards but not citizenship for them. Meanwhile, 19 percent think the undocumented immigrants should be deported.

Split down by party, 70 percent of Democrats, 61 percent of political independents and 51 percent of Republicans said they supported a pathway to citizenship with requirements, according to the survey. The poll did not define what those specific conditions are, but requirements can include background checks and payments of fines and back taxes.

Its possible that the 19% who want the undocumented to be deported were over-represented in the 1/3 of eligible voters who went to the polls on Tuesday. But that's one of the reasons why President Obama said this yesterday:

So, to everyone who voted, I want you to know that I hear you. To the two-thirds of voters who chose not to participate in the process yesterday, I hear you, too.

Calm, dignified competence as a threat

It's been fascinating to watch media pundits respond to President Obama's press conference yesterday. Given that so many of them had advanced the GOP message that this election was all about Obama, they were frustrated that the President did not appear at the podium depressed and contrite for having failed so badly. Instead, he said things like this:

What stands out to me, though, is that the American people sent a message, one that they’ve sent for several elections now. They expect the people they elect to work as hard as they do. They expect us to focus on their ambitions and not ours. They want us to get the job done. All of us in both parties have a responsibility to address that sentiment.

Dana Milbank signals the kind of response he was looking for by suggesting that President Obama wasn't troubled enough by the election results.

Indeed, Tuesday’s returns did not trouble him greatly, he said. “There are times when you’re a politician and you’re disappointed with election results,” he said. “But maybe I’m just getting older. I don’t know. It doesn’t make me mopey.”

In many ways, I think these pundits are just too lazy to dig deep into the many complex reasons for Tuesday's election results. Its so much easier to grab that GOP meme, make it all about Obama and then expect him to be contrite.

But in reading these kinds of accounts, I was reminded of something Jonathan Chait wrote about his reaction to the movie 12 Years a Slave.

Notably, the most horrific torture depicted in 12 Years a Slave is set in motion when the protagonist, Solomon Northup, offers up to his master engineering knowledge he acquired as a free man, thereby showing up his enraged white overseer. It was precisely Northup’s calm, dignified competence in the scene that so enraged his oppressor. The social system embedded within slavery as depicted in the film is one that survived long past the Emancipation Proclamation – the one that resulted in the murder of Emmett Till a century after Northup published his autobiography. It’s a system in which the most unforgivable crime was for an African-American to presume himself an equal to — or, heaven forbid, better than — a white person.

And yes, its a system that survives to this day - even if it is so often hidden from conscious view and buried deep in the reptilian portion of our brains.

The frustration of these pundits was at least partly influenced by their racist need to see this black president knocked down a peg or two. His "calm, dignified competence" in the face of the narrative they had crafted about his defeat enraged them.

While the torture Solomon Northrup endured for challenging this system was more severe under the institution of slavery, I firmly believe that President Obama is calmly and quietly confronting this form of racism every day. From the position of the most powerful person on earth, he is challenging the "unforgivable crime" in our culture of an African American who presumes himself to be "equal to - or, heaven forbid, better than - a white person."

President Obama: Please proceed, Senator McConnell (updated w/ video)

If you didn't get to watch President Obama's press conference this afternoon, I encourage you to do so.


He made a point of saying that he looks forward to hearing from McConnell and Boehner on what their agenda for Congress will be. And that he's willing to work on those areas where they can agree.

While some will undoubtably view this as pre-capitulation, its actually an amazing power play as well as a reprisal of conciliatory rhetoric as a ruthless strategy.

One way to deal with that kind of bad-faith opposition is to draw the person in, treat them as if they were operating in good faith, and draw them into a conversation about how they actually would solve the problem. If they have nothing, it shows. And that's not a tactic of bipartisan Washington idealists -- it's a hard-nosed tactic of community organizers, who are acutely aware of power and conflict.

Over the last 6 years, Minority Leader McConnell has been able to embrace a "post-policy" approach focused on total obstruction.  Now that Republicans control both chambers of Congress, President Obama is basically saying "puts your cards on the table and let's see what you've got."

After last night's election results, both National Review Online and Rush Limbaugh are counseling McConnell to keep up the obstruction. Jonathan Chait pretty much nailed what McConnell will see as his most effective strategy going forward:

McConnell’s next play is perfectly clear. His interest lies in creating two more years of ugliness and gridlock. He does not want spectacular, high-profile failures that command public attention — no shutdowns, no impeachment. Instead, he wants tedious, enervating stalemate. McConnell needs to drain away any possibility of hope and excitement from government, so that the disengaged Democratic voters remain disengaged in 2016.

So if you were President Obama, how would you chose to counter that? The truth is, no matter what you do, you're not going to get liberal policies enacted with Republicans in control of both chambers. If you simply yell and scream about obstruction, you look like a weak ineffective victim.

Today the President simply called on McConnell to "put up or shut up." That's his best way of undermining McConnell when/if the gridlock continues. In other words, its the best power play he has now - given what the midterm electorate did yesterday.

I also think that long before he decided to run for president, Barack Obama diagnosed what he thought was our biggest problem. No matter how daunting the challenges, what has kept us from tackling them has been our inability to do this:

Our goal should be to stick to our guns on those core values that make this country great, show a spirit of flexibility and sustained attention that can achieve those goals, and try to create the sort of serious, adult, consensus around our problems that can admit Democrats, Republicans and Independents of good will.

Until we can get there, we won't be able to move forward on much of anything else.

So...please proceed, Senator McConnell :-)

What does it mean?

First things first. Its always important to admit when you were wrong. And I was wrong. I thought this midterm was going to me more of a tie than a wave. It was a wave.

With that clear, its time to look at what happened and develop the story about what it means. That's what almost everyone is doing today. I'll be no exception. But with these caveats: (1) the results of yesterdays election cannot be summed up as "one thing," in a country this large and diverse, its way more complicated than that and (2) developing an accurate story will take time. We still have a lot of information to digest and so our immediate responses are likely to be more emotional than factual.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that the story Republicans will try to tell is that the results are a statement about the failure of President Obama. That's what they ran on - so that's what they will want us to believe. But that's not what midterm voters said. Exit pollsters asked the question: Was one reason for your vote today:

• To express support for Barack Obama - 19%
• To express opposition to Barack Obama - 33%
• Barack Obama was not a factor - 45%

When Republicans try to tell that story - they're only speaking for their base (the 33%). 

I think there's some merit to the idea that - by distancing themselves from President Obama - Democrats diluted their policy message and fed into the Republican frame of "its all about Obama." Allison Lundgren-Grimes decided that she couldn't run on the benefits of Obamacare to voters in Kentucky because its..well...Obamacare.

But there's also a lot of conflicting data about that. For instance, in my home state of MN, I cringed as Senator Franklin became unintelligible during a debate with his opponent on issues like foreign policy and immigration because he was working so hard to avoid supporting President Obama's positions. And yet he won by 10%. In other words, it didn't seem to hurt him. 

I doubt you'll find anyone who makes a better case for blaming the media than BooMan. 

...the polls were way off, basically eight or nine points too favorable for the Democrats. We cannot explain this polling error by reference to bad messaging. Something deeply emotional was going on with the electorate that caused them to break sharply against the Democratic Party beginning around the time of the first beheading by ISIS and then turning again sharply against us in the last days of the election, possibly related to anxiety over the Ebola virus.

The media are how these images and fears were primarily transmitted to the voting public, although the Republicans also made it part of their campaigns.

As he goes on to say, this one is almost impossible to capture with data.

In yesterday's case, it may be that a lot of people simply were influenced by a pervasive environment of (essentially) media-induced terror and it caused their brains to go reptilian. There is plenty of research to support the fact that people gravitate to the right when they feel physically threatened. This process goes on on a subconscious level which is not conducive to verbal articulation.

But even as he uses the Wilder (or Bradley) Effect to explain this subconscious process, he fails to mention how the media-induced terror collaborates in the reptilian portion of our brains with the notion that President Obama "isn't really one of us," thereby heightening our distrust and fear. In other words, this is how racism played a role.

A place where we DO have data is in the story of turnout. The members of the Obama coalition who showed up came through and voted for Democrats. For example, African Americans voted for Democrats at the rate of 89%, Latinos 63%, women 56%, young people 54% and LGB 67%. The trouble is...not enough of them voted.

If Democrats were going to hold off a Republican tsunami, they needed their base voters to come out to the polls and pull the lever for the president’s party. That didn’t happen where Democrats needed it to. Especially with young voters. Nationally, Democratic base groups -- young voters, single women, African-Americans and Latinos -- posted numbers that looked more like the Democrats’ 2010 midterm “shellacking” than Obama’s 2012 re-election victory. Most strikingly, voters 18-29 nationwide were only 13% of the electorate in 2014 (compared with 22% for GOP-leaning seniors.) In the 2010 midterms, young voters made up 12% of the voting public. In contrast, during Obama’s re-election victory in 2012, 19% of the electorate was under 30.

In the end, this is something Democrats MUST find a way to counter. Jonathan Cohn takes a pretty deep dive into the structural challenges.

A cardinal fact of American politics that has emerged during the Obama years is that demographic forces are slowly and inexorably driving the electorate leftward. But the Republican Party has its own corresponding advantages. Its voters turn out for elections reliably, not just in spasms of quadrennial excitement. They are dispersed efficiently in rural and exurban House districts, and reside disproportionately in the states that have disproportionate representation in the Senate. All these things give the Republican coalition, even as it remains unable to muster a presidential majority, unassailable control of Congress.

At this moment I don't have a lot by way of answers to these challenges. Let's just start by recognizing that simply pointing the finger at President Obama (who was actually able to expand the electorate when he was on the ballot) is self-defeating as well as wrong.

If you've read this far, let me point out that what I've said up until now is a pretty good example of yet another challenge that Democrats face. What I'm describing is a complex set of circumstances that contributed to "the Republican wave." It certainly doesn't provide hysterical link bait or an inspirational statement that will fit on a bumper sticker. It just happens to be a pretty comprehensive view of the political reality that is in the process of unfolding. So sue me :-)

It may all come down to Iowa

Of course I'll be watching the election results tonight and - due to the very real possibility of runoffs - into the next few months. But the states I'll be focusing on when it comes to control of the Senate are Colorado, Alaska and Iowa.

I am not convinced the polling is accurate in Alaska or Colorado. Here's why:

Alaska

1. Almost no one trusts the polling there. This article about St. Paul Island is a pretty good description of why.
2. That article is also informative about the incredible ground game that has been deployed by Begich - the Democratic candidate. 

Colorado

1. This is the first year that all registered voters received a mail-in ballot. That will likely change the "fundamentals" that many poll aggregators cook into their books.
2. As Nate Cohn documents, pollsters have not found a way to accurately incorporate Hispanic voters. In a state where they represent 21% of the population, that could make a difference.
3. Colorado is the state where the Democratic ground game (Bannock Street Project) was invented and is the reason Bennet won his Senate seat in 2010 - a year that was notoriously bad for Democrats.

If Begich and Udall defy the polls and win - its very likely that control of the Senate will come down to the race in Iowa. That's as far as I'm comfortable going with a prediction. But be sure and check out BooMan as he dives a little deeper into prognostication.