Three New York Times Columnists gave the Shirley Sherrod incident their full attention this week. Frank Rich and Bob Herbert put a pox on everyone involved - the press, the administration and the NAACP. Maureen Dowd, in her usual fashion, pressed on ad hominum attack on the White House and its Black President to say that the White House was too white. All three consider the episode to be a teachable moment for the White House, the President or our society at large. I too think it is a teachable moment for the White House and I'll discuss what I think the White House can learn from this, but I think the real pupil of this incident should be the press and the blogosphere. Go below the jump for more.
The Obama White House regularly applies lessons it has learned from the Clinton White House and the Shirley Sherrod episode illustrates its attempt to never get bogged down in fights with the Hard Right media. To do this the White House tries to nip Hard Right attacks in the bud before they gain traction. This is the strategy Maureen Dowd attacks today in her column about overprotective white guys in the White House.
Having tried a Plan A of ridiculing the likes of Rush Limbaugh and goading Republicans into abandoning him and now well into a Plan B of nipping attacks in the bud, the White House should shift to a Plan C that builds upon the methods and tactics the Obama campaign used to survive brutal attacks from Sean Hannity on Obama's associations with Reverend Wright. To be sure the Obama campaign did throw Rev. Wright under the bus, but when that did little to stop Hannity and the Hard Right from branding him an extremist who hated his country the President gave a well-received speech on race in Philadelphia. The speech was successful in part because it blunted the credibility of the Hard Right's attack by letting the nation see for itself that he was not the person Hannity had painted him to be. As it did when it campaigned, the Obama administration should not run from this culture war with the Right. It should embrace such a fight and it can do so without bogging itself down.
If it hasn't done so already, the White House should make two additions to its war room. Taking a page from the Ronald Reagan Presidency and its Sunshine in America meme, the Obama Presidency should regularly and repeatedly put faces on its Audacity of Hope racial meme, And here the pundits have got it right that Shirley Sherrod and her rural heroes are just the folks for the first salvo in such a campaign. The President's allies from his fatherhood outreach efforts would make great candidates for a follow up salvo. The second addition to the President's war room should take a page from Franklin Roosevelt's "Americans Working" meme. Even if the unemployment numbers were better the hard right would still win a perception battle for the hearts and minds of America because it is telling us that America isn't working. Duh, this should be easy for the White House to figure out. Pull out your media tool kit and tell us how, why and where America is working. Both these lines for media action talk back to the Hard Right without letting the Hard Right dictate the fight and without bogging itself down in tit for tat episodes.
But it takes two to defeat an attack machine as effective as that currently run by the Hard Right. The White House can try a Plan C described above, but the press itself has to find its inner "Edward R. Murrow." The 1954 Senate hearings on security risks in the Army run by Senator Joseph McCarthy routinely ruined the lives of a number of people it falsely accused of being communists. The Senator merely had to mention their names and their fate was sealed. In that limited sense there was a similarity to the Shirley Sherrod case in that an accusation was enough to put an innocent person in jeopardy. Although the Eisenhower administration played a role similar to that played by the Obama Administration, the press played the role of standing up for the Shirley Sherrod's of that day. Sadly, the Frank Rich's and Bob Herbert's of our day tut-tut about Shirley's case, but they place the responsibility for the episode at the door of the White House. Without a strong press policing itself and its responsibility for accuracy, even the best run White House could not on its own defeat a Joseph McCarty or his present day reincarnation in Rush, Glenn, Sean and the boys at Fox.