. . .they first make mad. Well the media gods don't have the power to drive Al Gore mad, but they can make everyone think he is. Check this exchange (with commentary from The Daily Howler) from Chris Matthew's show:
MATTHEWS (5/21/06): Kathleen [Parker], you wrote a column recently—I like the phraseology—you said Al Gore is “one slice short of a loaf.” (Group laughter) I mean, that’s like they say up in Massachusetts, they say things like, “He’s got a few shingles missing from the roof.” What’s your point? Is he a little nutty, are you saying?
Did he really have to ask? They’ve been calling Gore “nutty” for the past seven years! Purring sweetly, Parker carried out her role in this idiot play—in the play Beinart still won’t discuss:
PARKER: There are those who say he’s lost it. I’m not going to go that far. I think he’s actually feeling quite liberated from himself, I think he’s having a great time. He’s now the alpha wonk. And suddenly he has all these admirers and Hollywood types loving him with this movie.
Parker down-loaded “alpha male”—ha ha ha ha ha! And of course, we also heard from Joe Klein, who also thought that Gore might be a bit—well, a bit of a nut:
KLEIN: You know, there’s a big question here. If you read Al Gore’s speech just before the war in Iraq where he came out against it, it’s a brilliant speech. If you saw Al Gore delivering it, he looked like a madman.
They began with “delusional” in 3/99. By the time Gore opposed Iraq in 9/02, they had moved to “unhinged.” By last weekend, though, it was “nutty” and “madman”
Beautifully played, don't you think? Note how Parker can deny saying that she thinks Gore has "lost it" by saying she "wouldn't go that far", but then suggests that the people who really take him seriously are the flakes in the Hollywood crowd. In other words, Gore isn't to be taken seriously, and by extension neither is global warming.
The Daily Howler has for years now been on a crusade to show how the media unfairly crucified Al Gore in the runup to the 2000 election, and while his posts can be a bit rambling and repetitive, he has marshaled some pretty convincing evidence. I wasn't paying as much attention six years ago as I am now, and I'm not promoting Gore as flawless, but I have to admit I was taken in then by the way the MSM made fun of him, and I couldn't bring myself to vote for him and voted Green instead. Gore took Washington State, so it didn't matter, but in retrospect it was a mistake. People like me in swing states probably threw the election to Bush.
Anyway, like the Howler, I've since become convinced that the Beltway Courtiers have a consistent policy to discredit progressive-leaning candidates. What's their motivation? They're upwardly mobile careerists. They learn quickly that if they want to advance their careers and be one of the cool kids, they have to join in with the groupthink that makes fun of those whom the power clique deems as uncool. And for the power clique, any discussion of promoted by progressives that focuses on issues regarding power and money is not cool. Whenever the discussion turns to questions of power and money, the media realize all they have to do is change the subject to sex--it works every time.
I bring this subject up now to build on yesterday's post about how the GOP and the corporate media play the normal/weird card when they want to promote or destroy somebody's public credibility. They understand their power to legitimize and delegitimize, and they use it. They have an agenda, and they make sure that issues they don't want discussed are either ignored or ridiculed, and the same goes for personalities. What do you think was really behind the frontpage story in the NYT this week about Bill and Hillary's sex life? It plays implicitly on the frigidity/lesbian theme: "Gee," people think to themselves, "maybe that explains poor Bill's behavior."
It's not overt, of course. But it's there. And it does a good job, too, of laying the foundation for destroying her candidacy. Remember what happened to Ann Richards in 94? I'm no Hillary fan, but puhlease. Again, this is not the Enquirer we're talking about--it 's the NY Times. It's become a rag that I for one cannot take seriously anymore.
I also bring it up because Krugman (whom I'm sure Keller would love to dump if he could) focuses on the taking Gore seriously issue in his 5/26 column:
“An Inconvenient Truth” isn't just about global warming, of course. It's also about Mr. Gore. And it is, implicitly, a cautionary tale about what's been wrong with our politics.
Why, after all, was Mr. Gore's popular-vote margin in the 2000 election narrow enough that he could be denied the White House? Any account that neglects the determination of some journalists to make him a figure of ridicule misses a key part of the story. Why were those journalists so determined to jeer Mr. Gore? Because of the very qualities that allowed him to realize the importance of global warming, many years before any other major political figure: his earnestness, and his genuine interest in facts, numbers and serious analysis.
And so the 2000 campaign ended up being about the candidates' clothing, their mannerisms, anything but the issues, on which Mr. Gore had a clear advantage (and about which his opponent was clearly both ill informed and dishonest). . .
Since 2000, we've seen what happens when people who aren't interested in the facts, who believe what they want to believe, sit in the White House. Osama bin Laden is still at large, Iraq is a mess, New Orleans is a wreck. And, of course, we've done nothing about global warming.
But can the sort of person who would act on global warming get elected? Are we—by which I mean both the public and the press—ready for political leaders who don't pander, who are willing to talk about complicated issues and call for responsible policies? That's a test of national character. I wonder whether we'll pass.
But the point I was trying to make yesterday is that the GOP and its media and energy constituencies will do everything they can to discredit attempts to deal with global warming or other issues that undermine their respective agendas. And they do it by playing the normal/weird card. The Democrats have a very fundamental branding problem in that they have allowed the GOP to establish a narrative in which lots of people are predisposed to think of the Democrats as "not normal", so it's easy to make Al Gore look like he's a tree-hugging flake. In the Democratic world it's ok to be that, right? Sure, but Americans don't elect that kind of person to national office. And that's all that matters.
It doesn't matter if it's true or not. That's the genius of the GOP strategy. They realize that facts don't matter; it's all about the underlying narrative. And all the media have to do is play the story ambiguously enough to raise
a doubt. Isn't that what the media's collusion with the Swiftboaters did to Kerry? Why was that story given legitimacy and the Bush AWOL story not? Because Democrats aren't war heroes--that's not their narrative, so there's something wrong with this Kerry war hero picture. It was important instead that the GOP succeed in substituting the liberal long-haired war protestor narrative for the war hero narrative, and for the most part they succeeded.
It wasn't that hard to plant doubts. It doesn't matter that there was no substance to the Swiftboaters' allegations--there was just enough truthiness in them for people who are not sure what to believe to at least have doubts. As with Gore in 2000, "Where there's smoke there's fire," people think to themsleves. Well the GOP has learned how easy it is to blow smoke--they just have to play the weirdo-phony-liberal card.
And so we wind up voting instead for real, authentic men--strong, steady leaders like George Bush. Oy. The AWOL charges don't stick because it doesn't fit the GOP narrative developed for Bush that the Beltway media have bought into. Remember how they (particularly Chris Matthews) gushed over his appearance on the aircraft carrier in the flight suit. That's what fits into the narrative that the media believe, and they are allergic to any facts that would suggest the narrative has no basis in reality.
It's an amazingly effective con. But it's so easy to pull off because the basic liberal/conservative narrative is in place. If people weren't predisposed to think of liberals as, for instance, wishy-washy flip-floppers, the accusation wouldn't have stuck on Kerry. That's why it didn't work when liberals tried to point out that Bush had flip-flopped on several issues. Flip-flopping is not part of the conservative narrative--everybody knows conservatives are flinty and stubborn. They don't flip flop. It's not about the facts; it's about the narrative.
That's why progressives, if they are to have any chance at all, have to figure out a way to change the basic narrative, and that's why I think that the Dems might be beyond repair. Any attempts to change the narrative will be easily branded as inauthentic pandering. Whether fairly or not, they are too easy to discredit.