Based on the imagery and the language, which one of the following presidential candidates looks like they are primed to replace Barack Obama in the Oval Office.
I’m not going to blame the media for all of this, but let’s be frank and admit they they play a big part in how these candidates are perceived by the public.
The GOP Has Been Wrong On EVERYTHING! They Should Be Worrying About Whether Or Not Their “Apparatus” – The GOP – Will Survive Till 2017 – Or Be Replaced By An Entirely Different Entity – Built From The Ground Up! Donald Trump is Merely The “Wrecking Ball” To Bring Down The Current Structure So That An Entirely New One Can Be Constructed. The GOP As It Exists Today Is An Anachronism, A Relic, A Fossil Of A By-Gone Era. RIP!!!
Booman isn’t going to blame the media… Isn’t he the media?
The election is in 15 months. I don’t think anyone really cares. We all just hate the government and the media. Leave us alone.
Normal countries have elections that last 2 months at most. Normal countries do things so much better than us.
Normal countries have a politics that goes on in a steady state all the time in the background between elections. Based on parties.
We don’t. We have elections instead. And campaigns instead of parties.
It’s always been that way. Andrew Jackson started his 1828 candidacy the day after the House decided the 1824 election.
And that seems clearly inferior.
BooMan, I’m going to repeat (essentially) a comment I made in the previous post: I’m a fan of nearly 100% of what you write, but I can’t figure out why you’re taking this tack now.
Why aren’t you going to blame the media for all of this? They’re clearly responsible.
All those Tea Party voters (with their insane understanding of the current state of the nation and who’s to blame) didn’t manifest out of nowhere: they were a strategic creation; an “astroturf”-generated rebranding. Every one of the ideas in play right now — the entire groundwork for Trump and for the anti-Hillary sentiment — comes directly from press bias.
I mean this isn’t a new angle. Books have been written about it. Jay Rosen at NYU has been particularly eloquent on the topic: how the press (not just Fox, but the New York Times, ABC News, etc.)
Sorry if I sound shrill, but there’s so much to bolster each of these points (you can start with Charlie Pierce’s excoriation of Frank Bruni and the Times’ bizarre choice of Bruni to cover Bush, just to begin with, before getting to Judy Miller etc.).
These are top-down phenomena! As I wrote in your previous post (the long one about the “stupid” electorate), don’t blame the victims. Americans can be extremely reasonable and pragmatic when they’re not being systematically misled.
You’re right. But then why does someone from Camp Clinton go around to the media yesterday saying that they’ve got a lot of super delegates already. Basically boasting of elite support? While I don’t think Sanders ever directly criticizes Clinton by name, this surely bolsters his case. And it was an unforced error by the Clinton team.
Point by point, instance by instance, you’ll find statistical noise. But the basic argument is overwhelmingly sound.
Of course it’s possible to pry into the deeper roots of the phenomenon I’m describing (investigate why Fox News takes its positions; why Tom Brokaw was so nakedly hostile to Obama and friendly to McCain while moderating that debate; discover why the Times made the baffling decision to assign a food critic to cover Bush; etc.) but the media is where the investigation starts.
As I said, I’m just opposed to “blame the victim”/”blame the powerless” arguments — and I’m opposed to “the public is stupid” arguments. The “stupid” public gets it right a remarkable percentage of the time.
You know, when you don’t have an agenda, it’s pretty easy to get rolled by “the media”- Sure, the press by and large hates her, but really, her biggest problem is that she is the status quo which makes her one of the most risk adverse candidates that we have had. Maybe a little outside the box thinking like asking for more debates or something like that might shake up her coverage a bit. Actually, debates are one of those horse race issues that the press does cover.
Maybe she could talk a bit more like Sanders, you know, give us the feeling that she really believes in something, has a core, a calling other than the careers of Hill and Bill. She might also promise that Chelsea won’t run the family business from a server in the White House. Do you get it, she does not inspire confidence and any amount of out of the box thinking—something she in entirely incapable of doing—will not matter. How would she as SoS ever have managed to deal directly and face-to-face with Iran? Answer: she wouldn’t have, so she quit the job to run for prez—for who knows how many times by now.
Her biggest problem is that the press hates her.
There’s so much coverage of Bush vs. Gore and how the press hated him,and how decisive that was. The Bush victory was just unfathomable (and barely happened, or didn’t happen, anyway). The press, essentially, gave us Bush.
Remember when they had the TANG information and spiked it at the White House’s request? Remember when the NYT had the “he’s wearing a wire in the debate” story and buried it? Remember when they had the Niger Yellow Cake expose and dropped it “because they didn’t want to unduly influence the election”?
Media Matters, Press Watch (Jay Rosen) and many others have compiled detailed, well-researched accounts of nakedly pro-Republican press bias. It’s not on the editorial pages (where the Times, for example, is reliably liberal). It’s in the reporting.
Booman writes:
Give the candidates some credit, too. Or some blame, whatever you wish. Trump is playing the media for all he’s worth, and he’s worth billions. HRC is a worthless campaigner. She was bad last time and she is worse this time. No talent for the game. She takes no joy in it. Not really. She’s just going by the book, and it’s the wrong book for this fight.
If one was to “blame” the media, it would have to be that they are not helping HRC be something that she is not, and why should they? What’s in it for them? Plus in attempting to harm Trump…which the mainstream media is definitely trying to do, from the MSNBC left on through the center and right on up to Fox News….the tactics they have used are actually helping him. Like I said in a recent post, you cannot laugh a clown off the stage. Laughter only encourages a clown. Neither can you insult him off the stage. A clever clown always has a hidden seltzer bottle or other comic weapon ready and waiting for someone who is trying to make fun of him. Only facts will bring Trump down. Facts ands figures, honestly, accurately and efficiently presented.
Seen any?
Me neither.
There is where the blame lays.
Will it happen?
I doubt it more and more with every passing TrumpDay.
So it goes.
Down like a motherfucker.
Bet on it.
Later…
AG
I have an alternative hypothesis: Trump gets away with shit that other candidates don’t because he’s continually touching the raw nerve of cultural grievance.
If Clinton was running an aggressive issues-centered campaign that continually called the Republican Party out for white supremacism and hostility to women while continually hammering income inequality and ‘America needs a raise’, this e-mail shit would’ve gone away yesterday. Because she’s not out there repeatedly saying stuff that her constituency likes.
If Clinton doesn’t want to be at the mercy of the media, she needs to run a gish gallop. I’m not saying that it’ll instantly repair her image, but wouldn’t she rather have people in the media wringing their hands over ‘OMG, she said that Reagan was the worst President to happen to our country since Harding’ or ‘did she REALLY just say that Fox News and people like Trump are to blame for the rash of shootings?’
There’s no reason why e-mailgate has to be hurting her so much. And make no mistake, it is: the most recent and respected Iowa poll of likely Iowa Caucus goers has had her lead over Sanders narrow to 7%. Yet Obama had made much more grievous pseudo-scandals in front of a more hostile electorate and survived. ‘cling to guns and religion’ or Wright would’ve, if he was playing by Clinton’s rules, completely killed him. But it didn’t because he was able to change the subject. He addressed the issue and more important kept throwing out new shinies for the media to focus on.
If a dimwit like Trump can use that strategy successfully, why not Clinton? I understand her hostility towards the media, but telling them to fuck off and then not doing anything special to try to win Democratic votes or change the subject is a terrible mistake. Seriously, look at her schedule for August 2015: what the fuck is that shit? Except for fundraisers, which shouldn’t be substituted for rallies, that’s a near-total campaign blackout.
And here’s her schedule for the rest of the year:
I mean, really. What the hell is she doing?
To read the subtext of the imagery alone, Democrat Donald Trump is winning and Republican Hillary Clinton is struggling to the point of having to reorganize her campaign. There’s some fundamental cross-advertising of party identity going on with the two campaigns that likely will confuse a few voters.
The problem is not that we know the media is biased. We known that since Whitewater. The problem is that the Democrats are not working to get beyond that or end-run that but continue to try to get through the corporate media by kissing up or playing access extortion. Except for Bernie Sanders who for the moment is using social media promoted and covered events. The question is whether he will find a way to turn that into the number of voters required to beat Hillary CLinton or other Democratic candidates. And then the same question for the general election.
The way forward for progressives lies in making all of the billions of Citizens United media money irrelevant to the outcome of the campaign. There is no other way to bell the cat than having enough people to outvote them.
Nonsense. That implies organizing, a ground game, coalition-building, probably strengthening state parties – which I am reliably informed are full of politicians (ew!).
We nominate a charismatic, sufficiently-left candidate, and the rest happens auto-magically.
The power of ideas. Being right is the best argument, and the only campaigning you need. Don’t you read the internet?
The establishment wing needs to internalize this much more than the DFHs. It isn’t the DFHs who abandoned the 50-state strategy or stood gormless in the face of ALEC or who are currently going “lol, look at O’Malley and Sanders struggling with PoC. … oh, Clinton actually plans to do less for them than those two, but lol DFHs and their white progressive insularity.”
Look at the schedule I just posted upthread. Where the hell is the coalition-building in that schedule? Sanders isn’t my first choice and I still think that he’s kind of a hapless candidate, but at least he’s hitting the pavement.
Why Democrats continue to fail. Division on policy. Critical policy that affects peace and prosperity.
Dems say party chair blocked Iran resolution at DNC meeting
Were they about to stiff their President’s major foreign policy achievement or were they about to embarrass the AIPAC toadies?