Cross-posted at Election Inspection
I'm with The Field's Al Giordano on this, we are setting ourselves up for a major fall:
What members of the national media don't understand - what they have never understood - is why "running against the media" is such a good strategy.
Most members of the commercial media don't want to face what everybody else knows - that as institutions go, that of "the media" is as hated or more so than George W. Bush and the US Congress.
Unfortunately, in recent days, too many bloggers and their commenters have forgotten that truth, too.
Bloggers, in general, claim to understand just how much the public distrusts the media. We bloggers have been "running against the media" from the get-go. It's one of the biggest keys to our success: that readers turn to us instead of the commercial media it distrusts. The one thing that could most rapidly destroy that for us would be if we became, in the public's mind, associated with the same sloppy arrogance which it associates with the media.
That ought to be a no brainer. But in recent days, too many bloggers and their commenters have aped the worst qualities of the commercial media in such a way as to allow the McCain campaign and the far right to lump us in with the reviled commercial media to make us, too, the receptacle of that public hatred.
It's about the "unvetted diaries," stupid.
Netroots and pro-Democratic party blogs have become the staging areas for "unvetted diaries" - some planted, no doubt, by covert McCain backers, others as sincere as they are imbecilic - that screech about McCain not vetting his vice presidential pick while behaving just as irresponsibly as their target. Too many bloggers and their commenters have jumped on rumors - about pregnancies and other matters - that turned out to be false, and have harmed the messengers' own credibility by stating them as fact.
And in cases where the front-page bloggers at websites did not engage in such boneheaded activity, but their rank-and-file diarists or commenters did, we who run our blogs have a special responsibility to step in and put things right again.
The logic in too much of the blogosphere - left, right, and other - is that if a claim is potentially damaging to the enemy, it gets shouted as "fact" far and wide, even before the claim is investigated and vetted. Beyond the already double-edged sword of preggers-gate, this occurred in recent days with blogger claims that Governor Palin was a "member" of the Alaska Independent Party (now swatted down with documents; she's always been a registered Republican) and that she "supported" Pat Buchanan for president in 2000 (she supported Steve Forbes).
Al's not talking about the stuff that is true and that are clearly related to her political (or that which is obviously related to it) judgement but about the personal attacks and the stuff that has been, in all honesty, blown out of proportion and the stuff that is pretty clearly a personal attack against Palin's family.
In addition to Al's post about the political ramifications of these attacks (which I believe are definitely solid) there is also a post written by hilzoy of Obsidian Wings which touch on the moral question of the attacks which have definitely been of a more personal nature:
I want no part of this. None at all. To those of you who think otherwise: that's your right. But ask yourself how you felt when Republicans scored points using Chelsea Clinton, who didn't ask to be dragged into the spotlight either.
As far as I'm concerned, it's fair game to consider Sarah Palin's statements about her daughter's decision, and to compare them to her own views about abortion. That's a story about whether or not Sarah Palin sticks to her beliefs when they affect her own family, not about her daughter. But it is not fair game to use her daughter, or any of her kids, as pawns in a political argument. To my mind, this extends to using her daughter as evidence that abstinence-only education doesn't work: presumably, no one thinks that it works 100% of the time, and that's the only claim to which this one counterexample could possibly be relevant. (That's why God created large-scale studies.) Likewise, I think that arguing about whether Sarah Palin is a good mother is out of line: we have no idea at all what arrangements she and her husband have made for child care, how their relationship works, and so forth. Assuming that Sarah Palin would have to be her children's primary caregiver is just sexist.
If the past is any guide, some people will respond to this post by saying that the Republicans would not hesitate to use Democrats' teenage children to score political points. That may be. Three responses: first, so what? Just because they do it doesn't mean that we should. Second, any argument for going there would have to assume that this would, in fact, be a political winner, and thus that not using it would entail some sort of political sacrifice. I am not at all convinced that that is true. Most importantly, though, there are some lines I'm not willing to cross no matter what the other side does.
Ignoring the political consequences for a moment (which I do believe are probably not to the Democrats' advantage) this is not something which would ever be acceptable to us if the Republicans were doing it to us (and before anyone jumps at me, I know damn well they have) and there is a good reason for that, it isn't right and saying that this it "serves 'em right" just doesn't measure up. I'm sorry, but I don't really care that Sarah Palin's daughter is pregnant and I also don't give a damn whether or not she ultimately gets married or not. It's one thing to attack Sarah Palin for being a right-wing extremist who believes that creationism should be taught in public schools, that women should never be allowed to get an abortion (unless they are at risk of dying), and that her own experience is completely lacking; but things like campaigning while having a five-month old (and don't feed me this crap about the baby having Down's Syndrome, because this is certainly not something that would be asked of male candidates, so whatever I think of Sarah Palin, it is definitely pretty sexist), or some DUI on her husband's record when he was in his twenties, or things which are pretty clearly in that same league.
Many of the liberal responses on the net have been along the lines of "well, do you think the Republicans would hold back on this" or "well, they had it coming" which always reminds of the basic argument behind the death penalty, the guys who did that deserved it, which always tend to ignore key things like it doesn't deter crime or that it is completely inconsistent with would own sensibilities as human beings. This argument shows that this has nothing to do with what is right or not or what is a good idea or not, and has everything to do with the fact that because they did something really bad, that gives us the inherent right to do something really bad right back.
Marching down this road does absolutely nothing to help us take back the White House and it certainly leaves us at a point where we are no better than the Republicans, which is almost inherent in the typical response to Al, Hilzoy, or myself: "The Republicans did it first".