John King is one of my least favorite of the mostly credulous tools that inhabit CNN, but he's done a surprisingly good job here of reading a political ad. He calls it a "political fact check" of Ben Quayle's much-mocked ad, but it's not fact checking that he's doing. What he's doing is deconstructing for his audience what's really behind what's being said in the ad:
(partial transcript below)
That's a pretty bold statement - the worst president in history. Now he's a Republican. Republicans criticize the president all the time, but 'the worst president in history'? That's putting yourself out there. Why? Well there are ten Republicans in this primary that Ben Quayle is in and he's trying to distinguish himself, and it's a Republican-leaning district. He couldn't say that if he had a swing district with a lot of Democrats, but this is largely a Republican district and a Republican primary. He's trying to be very provocative in doing it."....
He's 33 years old, he's trying to get younger people to send some new faces to Washington. And then he talks about drug cartels. Remember he's running in a Phoenix-Scottsdale Arizona area district. The drug cartels and illegal immigration are big issues there, and again in a Republican primary, 'tax cartels' - interesting language there, talking about taxes, always important to Republican voters, in a very negative connotation there, with the term 'cartels' in D.C."....
An interesting close there - 'I was raised right.' Among Republican voters, Dan Quayle is a name they know and he doesn't have the negative baggage he might have among independents or Democratic voters, so Ben Quayle is not afraid there to say, hey, 'I'm a Quayle, I have a Republican pedigree. That's what he's saying there. ....
And lastly, 'Washington's broken, somebody needs to go there and knock the hell out of the place.' Sort of a plain-spoken language, when more than two-thirds of the public think the country is off on the worng track and a lot of them blame Washington. It's tough language, but probably pretty smart language for a Republican candidate who's trying to distinguish himself.
Pretty tough message, pretty good ad, if you're running in a Republican primary in a Republican district. But why else is this interesting? Well, this candidate's in a little bit of trouble right now, there's been a lot of controversy because he's finally admitted after at first saying no, that he was for a short time a contributor to a pretty racy website...a little embarrassing if you're running as a family values conservative. One of the golden rules of politics, today and a hundred-plus years ago, is if you're dealing with a bit of a controversy, try to change the subject. A tough ad like that - maybe it'll help him change the subject.
Of course King tries to soft-peddle the Quayle porn site scandal, and fails to give a person who's trying to run on being an offshoot of the Republican royalty that is Dan Quayle his proper mocking, but maybe even in spite of himself King is doing a deeply subversive thing here, which I think all political commentators should be doing all the time about politicians' political messaging - pointing out that all is not what it seems. King doesn't even consider what's being said as being within the realm where you talk about true or false. He's showing that the messages are crafted to provoke a desired reaction in a specified demographic, and that's it.
This is something the media should be doing all the time to educate voters to not take what's being said by politicians at face value. Too many uninformed people take the incendiary claims that out-of-power Republicans are making at face value and are frightened by them. These people are on my TV and they're saying those things, so they must be true, right?
A more critically savvy public as audience would cut off at the knees so much of the deeply stupid controversy that infests partisan combat and that passes for political discussion in the media.
It's also something Democrats should be doing to Republican political attacks. When you respond to "Democrats are letting terror anchor babies be born here and they're going to make us all die!" as something that needs to be factually refuted, you're already losing, because you've been sucked into the paranoid Republican framing of the immigration issue instead of starting from a liberal view of immigrants as generally benign, productive, and deeply a part of the tradition of the country.
So, kudos to John King. A small step but one in the right direction from him.