The Frank Rich column in yesterdays NYT was, of course, the first coherent statement of the tension between reality and the media that was nagging me.
Leading off with the observation:
ANOTHER weekly do-or-die primary battle, another round of wildly predicted "game changers" that collapsed in the locker room.
Mr. Rich scratches the itch, the nagging feeling we have all had that everything we are hearing and reading about the Democratic Primary is just slightly off center.
I began to chaff at Pat Buchannan, and Chris Matthews promoting their testosterone poisoned, cowardly, "let's you and him fight" meme. Trying to gin up a brawl so that they might gleefully "comment". They continually criticized Barack Obama for his rhetoric. All the while they were praising Hillary Clinton for her "toughness and spunk".
The reason that politicians and the press have gotten so much so wrong is that we keep forgetting what year it is. Only if we reboot to 2008 will the long march to November start making sense.
Then we have Terry McAuliff, with his manic, giddy, insistence on "how the race will be won" for Ms. Clinton. Howard Wolfson, would appear and pull a 180 on pronouncements made less than 48 hours earlier, and the entire Right-Wing Machine would swing wildly between concocted scandals and carefully selected polling data that painted the Democrats on the verge of inter-tribal warfare.
It kept bothering me. I was having a great deal of trouble putting my finger on exactly why, but it kept bothering me. I would mutter, "They are still playing old politics." But I nearly fell for their scheme.
I wanted Senator Obama to fight back. I wanted him to look tough, too. I worried about "low-information voters", and "white working class voters", and "racist voters", and secretly kept hoping that Mr. Obama would lash back. That he would not let himself be defined by the operatives and talking heads, but would step up and define himself.
Boy! Did I miss the point!
Almost every wrong prediction about this election cycle has come from those trying to force the round peg of this year’s campaign into the square holes of past political wars. That’s why race keeps being portrayed as dooming Mr. Obama — surely Jeremiah Wright = Willie Horton! — no matter what the voters say to the contrary. It’s why the Beltway took on faith the Clinton machine’s strategic, organization and fund-raising invincibility.
Barack Obama has been fighting back. He has been consistently demonstrating something I have believed lost in our political dialogue. He has been showing a complete unwillingness to answer the "boxer or briefs" question. He has been unwilling to paint himself as less than a brilliant, sophisticated, knowledgable statesman in the making. And he has left the old political operatives, and the candidates they handle, withering in the throes of irrelevance.
Barack Obama's New Politics is really an old politics. A politics that values dignity, intelligence, and skill at framing issues. A politics appropriate to an America that must regain its role on the world stage, again. It's a politics that pre-dates the cable 24/7 bombardment of opinion formation and pandering to their view of voters as mindless boobs, easily manipulated by innuendo, and manufactured outrage.
And the political commentariat has not quite figured that out, as yet. They have watched every power play they have called into life, hoping to control the national consciousness, fail. They have misread, misunderstood, and mis-diagnosed every twist and turn as we have watch this epic struggle between old machine politics, and the new politics of the people, erupt on the national stage.
I am grateful to Frank Rich for elucidating the issues so clearly. I'm grateful to him for scratching my itch. And, I am so grateful to have been so wrong. It was a kind of politics I wanted to believe in, a kind of politics I remembered. But the past 30 years have left me battered and bruised. I was unable to see my hopes for this campaign mirrored in the reactions of so many others. I forgot that "fighting" is for bullies, and pandering is for the weak. I feel very fortunate to learn that so many new voters, and young people, see beyond the trap of those who stand outside of the process and egg on the brawl.
This time, we may just get it right. This time the tricks and ploys of the past 30 years may just not work. And my faith is gradually being restored...