This page contains links to recent blogs by Lincoln Mitchell
Tagged with: Fox News
The MAGA movement is a profound threat to American democracy, but the movement gains a lot of strength from enablers who see it as an opportunity to enrich themselves and who understand that Trump’s supporters, particularly the most extreme, are easy marks. If somebody can be persuaded to follow Donald Trump, then they can be sold pretty much anything.
The most important thing happening in American politics today is not partisan fighting, the latest polling on Donald Trump or the election, Trump’s daily disinformation show or the minutia of how one state is trying to disenfranchise voters. Rather, it is the bigger picture-that the ruling party is trying desperately trying to consolidate a nondemocratic regime before they lose the election-and they are doing this under the cover of the darkness and fear cast by a genuinely dangerous and frightening pandemic.
Donald Trump has acted exactly as we could have expected. He has been overmatched by the complexity of the problem, has seen this as a personal attack on him, doled out dangerous advice, ranted and Tweeted rather than offer helpful solutions and has called for shutting the borders long after the virus has become widespread here in the US. Trump’s narcissism, venality, unwillingness to learn anything and abject incompetence have combined into a perfect storm that has contributed to the spread of false information, made it extremely difficult to get tests for the virus and endangered the safety of every American. The presidential administration in general has focused not on solving the problem but on reacting to the president’s outbursts while simultaneously seeking to conceal the extent of his incapacity.
While Wolf’s comments may have been more offensive than any similar speech in the past, they are also a reminder that gatherings of the media political tribes, where animus can be put aside for an evening, like the White House Correspondents Dinner, no longer have a space in Donald Trump’s divided, hyperpartisan and mean spirited America. For those in conservative media who have always tried to keep one foot in mainstream respectability, Wolf’s speech is a reminder that is no longer possible. Spokespeople like Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and more importantly media enablers of Trump’s viciousness and democratic rollback from previously respectable or semi-respectable media outlets and even those from more moderate media outlets who simply profit from the fight, will no longer be given a free pass. For the huge majority of Americans who were not at the dinner and who don’t make their living talking about Trump (I do it on a volunteer basis), this is very good news.
Did the Obama administration make a grievous mistake in swapping prisoners for the release of US solider Bowe Bergdahl? Yes, no, maybe, I don't know, who really cares? All of these answers are, in one respect or another true. The Bergdahl controversy is almost a caricature of American political discourse in the Obama era with both sides taking strong and outspoken positions based simply on whether or not they like the President, fighting in the media over something that is not very important, and making sure that the public bickering obscures more significant government decisions and policies.
This has been a difficult election season for Fox News. Among the most enduring media images of the last few days of the election are Karl Rove late on election night angrily denying that Ohio, and thus the presidency, had gone to President Obama, and Dick Morris only a few days before the election confidently predicting a Romney landslide. Morris later tried to explain away his mistake after the election by claiming he had done it to create enthusiasm among Republican voters. The incidents involving Rove and Morris, both of whom work as both commentators on Fox and political consultants to conservative clients, are obviously embarrassing for Fox, but also raise the question of whether the network has outlived its value, even to the Republican Party.
One of the reasons Mitt Romney has had such a difficult time nailing down the Republican nomination, in addition to his ample weaknesses as a candidate, is that rather than running against one or two other candidates seeking to represent their party on the November ballot and become president in 2013, Romney has been forced to campaign against a seemingly endless stream of candidates who are not serious about trying to become president. Newt Gingrich is running for a job on Fox News; Rick Santorum is running to make a point about theocracy being a better system of government than democracy; Ron Paul is running to draw attention to his Libertarian views; and Herman Cain seemed to be running for the fun of it, which is why he quit when it stopped being fun.
There is a not very fine line between issues that should concern a president and issues on which a Fox News commentator should spend his or her time. This was made very evident last week. On Tuesday night President Obama gave his State of the Union address. State of the Union addresses are a rarely compelling form of political theater, but they are significant because they allow the president to present his agenda and goals to the American people. On Thursday night, by contrast, the remaining four Republican presidential candidates engaged in what seemed like their 400th debate. Actually it was only their 19th.
Herman Cain's recent inability to demonstrate a command of even the most basic facts and debates around recent events in Libya made Rick Perry's failure to recall which three federal agencies he wanted to abolish during a recent debate seem positively statesmanlike by comparison. Cain, however, is not the first presidential candidate, or occupant of one of the country's highest offices to make the kind of mistake that would embarrass an above average high school student. Vice President Dan Quayle famously advised a young schoolboy to add the letter "e" to the end of the word "potato" during a spelling exercise. Similarly, poor command of the facts and garbled pronunciation were almost a defining characteristic of George W. Bush during his campaign for the presidency.
The Democratic Party finds itself in a different situation as the sitting Democratic president is running unopposed for the nomination and already has a sufficiently enormous lead in fundraising and organization that any primary challenger who would emerge at this point would be badly defeated. The Occupy Wall Street movement is wisely not even talking about running somebody against President Obama in the Democratic Party, but this would be about the best thing that could happen to the Obama campaign. If such a candidate were to emerge, Obama could move to the center now, run up a string of impressive primary victories and use his ample resources to marginalize the Occupy Wall Street, largely through attacking the credentials and credibility of whichever flawed candidate was supported by the Occupy Wall Street. This would put him in a strong position for November especially as once he secured his nomination Obama would then be able to use his resources to again court the activist wing of the party. Additionally, running somebody against Obama would, in of itself, erode much of the Occupy Wall Street movement's support because many liberals would see the movement as seeking to destroy President Obama and behaving counter-productively.
With Mitch Daniels confirming that he will not run for president, and new polls showing that Mitt Romney is the clear frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 2012, there is a real possibility that the 2012 primary will be over before it really starts. There is a small possibility that one of the candidates like Michele Bachmann or Newt Gingrich will galvanize the far right and make a race of it, and an even smaller possibility that a new candidate like Chris Christie will make a late entrance into the race and win the nomination, but with about eight months before the first vote is cast, Romney is increasingly likely to be the nominee.
During the last few months a very strange political development has occurred. Most of the Republican candidates seeking to unseat President Obama in November have encounteredserious trouble raising money. By April of 2007, Hillary Clinton had raised $36 million; and Barack Obama had raised $24 million. No Republican candidate today has even approached these totals. Some Republican candidates, like Mitt Romney, can finance much of their campaigns themselves, but financing an entire presidential campaign is extremely expensive and should not be necessary for candidates, particularly Republican candidates, who enjoy significant political support.
Glenn Beck's rally this past weekend will undoubtedly be remembered as a strange episode in American political history as well as perhaps the single biggest act of egotism since Ross Perot ran for president in 1992. It is possible, however, that the event will be remembered more for the outlandish claims made by participants and the eccentricities, to be generous, of its leaders than for any lasting impact on American political life.
Sarah Palin's recent statement that, presumably during her childhood, she and her family used to cross the border from Alaska to take advantage of Canada's health care system is not really a gaffe or a verbal slipup, but offers an interesting insight into Palin. It is not exactly surprising, or even"ironic," to use Palin's words, that somebody who has made a name, and a great deal of money, for herself by linking health care reform to some kind of socialist bogeyman, used to take advantage of socialized medicine.
As a political phenomenon, the Tea Partiers are more colorful than mysterious. They are not really a new or post-party phenomenon, but are the latest incarnation of the populist conservative wing of the Republican Party, the political descendants of Richard Nixon's Silent Majority or the angry white men who catapulted Newt Gingrich and the Republican Party into control of the Congress in 1994. Tea Partiers will vote overwhelmingly for the Republican Party in November, or they will stay home. Very few will vote Democratic; and third party rumblings that have not yet died away, will do so in the next months.
Obama's transition from the candidate of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party to being broadly appealing to the American center began during the campaign. Correspondingly, the general election campaign of 2008 may have been the beginning of the resurgence of the American center. The two national elections preceding 2008 had been extremely close and extremely divisive. These elections contributed to an eight year period of intense partisan fighting and an evenly and intensely divided electorate. In 2008 this changed. During this time, partisan rhetoric on the extreme left, while not as nasty, outrageous or dangerous as what the right wing has said during the last year or so, was strong and viciously critical of President Bush, his policies and those around him.
One of the mantras of the opposition to meaningful health reform has been a fear of a government takeover of the health care sector. This fear is expressed virtually nonstop on talk radio, the right wing blogosphere, Fox News and at town hall meetings across the country. As we know, for better or for worse, the Obama administration is not proposing a government takeover of the entire health care system, but overstatement and exaggeration is unavoidable in these kinds of debates.
The presidential campaign has begun to fall into a recognizable pattern. Every week, Obama seems to begin to appear more presidential and generate good news for his campaign, while McCain seems less able to handle the task of running for president. Each week he seems to make a few more gaffes, get a few more details wrong and generally fail to generate much excitement. Yet, the poll numbers remain stubbornly close. The newest national polls continue to show this race as almost a dead heat while statewide polls show Obama and McCain splitting the likely battleground states. The good news last week for McCain was that he was pulling ahead in Ohio and in a dead heat with Obama in Florida, while Obama had slight leads in key states such as Virginia, New Hampshire and Colorado. Obama is still the favorite but the poll numbers seem to be moving a lot more slowly than the campaign narrative.
Recent comments by John McCain's advisor Charlie Black regarding the potential impact of future terrorist attacks on McCain's presidential campaign, "Certainly it would be a big advantage to him," are not just offensive and inappropriate, but indicate that the McCain campaign is increasingly out of touch with how American voters are feeling this year. Black's comments rested on the notion that somehow Americans, if they feel threatened, will naturally turn to the crusty old Republican veteran rather than the untested, liberal, anti-war Democrat.