The Alito Hearings, The Media, And "Responsible" Blogging

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Friday January 20, 2006 · 7:36 AM PST

2006/01/20 · 07:36

Kevin Drum writes that the Democrats failed to seize the "winning" issue on Alito, the unitary executive theory:

Robert Parry thinks that Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee badly screwed up their questioning of Samuel Alito -- a proposition that's hard to argue with -- and suggests that instead of the scattershot approach they adopted they should have lasered in on his support for expansive executive powers:

Alito has been such an unapologetic supporter of the right's beloved Imperial Presidency that Alito's one noteworthy assurance -- that George W. Bush was not "above the law" -- was essentially meaningless because in Alito's view, Bush is the law.
I'm inclined to agree, although there's an inconvenient fact that gets in the way of Parry's suggestion: Bush is hardly the first president to promote the "unitary executive" theory. Nor is it an exclusively Republican fixation.

Sigh. Kevin misses the most significant part of Parry's piece and THEN repeats GOP talking point misinformation - that other Presidents have made the sweeping claims of Presidential power that Bush makes now. Here is the part of Parry's piece that really is central to the Democratic problem of message on all issues:

The Democrats must have realized that the mainstream media would focus on the most trivial aspects of the hearings--as well as on the windiness of the senators' long-prefaced questions. The only hope to change those dynamics would have been to present a strong alternative narrative.
. . .
The Left's Media Mistake
In a larger sense, however, the hapless Judiciary Committee Democrats reflect some of the damaging strategies that liberals and progressives have followed for 30 years.
Rather than building a media infrastructure to match up with the imposing right-wing message machine, the American left has concentrated on supporting interest groups in Washington and doing "grassroots organizing," supposedly across the country.
. . . The lack of any significant media on the left--at least any that compares with the right's media juggernaut--has left Democratic politicians feeling isolated, trying to triangulate the best deal they can for themselves. Many leading Democrats seem to suffer a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, in which they become passive or even helpful in the face of their tormentors.

Parry has some invective for "liberal interest groups" that seems unduly harsh and not really that correct in my view. And Parry also seems to ignore his own statement that the Media would not cover the actual issues but rather the trivia. Why did Kennedy hit on CAP and Vanguard? Because Kennedy was looking for a way to break through to the Media and he was trying to use those weapons he thought might work. To ignore the Media lay of the land Kennedy faced is to not understand the problem clearly. And the problem is the Media.

As Peter Daou explained:

Which brings me to the Alito hearings, a perfect instance for the left's triangle to change conventional wisdom, to shape public opinion. But rather than a Democratic triumph, the Alito hearings have thrown the dichotomy between the netroots and the Democratic leadership into even starker relief, illustrating the profound dysfunction of the left's triangle. As well, the depth and breadth of media complicity and the obliviousness of so many Democrats to it, is alarming. From the choreography of Specter and Alito creating the "open mind on abortion" soundbite that media outlets dutifully ran with, to the Sen. Graham/Mrs. Alito tear-fest that should have prompted Dems to slam the Republicans for bringing the Judge's wife to tears but instead turned into another Dem-bashing occasion, to the complete failure of the Democratic leadership to create the appropriate tone of outrage (in soundbite form), the chronic breakdown of the establishment and media sides of the left's triangle is apparent.

"Responsible bloggers" like Kevin Drum, and Steve Clemons (who wrote that Harry Reid was being too partisan on the Abramoff scandal), and the folks at The New Republic who think the Left blogs are too mean to the Media, still live in a cocoon of denial of the centrality of the Media to the problem. The debate on blog wonkery that appears to be continuing, is emblematic of this disconnect that the "responsible bloggers" have with the reality of politics and the Media today.

I have some more thoughts on the flip.

On the issue of the unitary executive, certainly the Democratic Senators did not do a good job of explaining the issues. I said as much to Sam Seder on The Majority Report (3rd hour).

But let's suppose for a moment the Dem Senators did do a good job on it. How would it have been covered by the Media? Do you really think they would have covered the story much better? I don't. After the first day of hearings, the New York Times wrote an atrocioius article on the day's action. I excoriated the coverage in this post:

Tomorrow, the New York Times publishes three stories on the Alito hearings demonstrating that its incompetence in political reporting is now spreading to other parts of the newspaper. And indeed two of the stories are authored by the two worst reporters in the nation - Elizabeth Bumiller and Adam Nagourney. The results are not surprising - the utter lack of substance in these articles on the issues the New York Times editorialized required airing shows you that this once great paper is now not even mediocre.

"Responsible" bloggers will tell you that I was out of line and "shrill." Indeed, many "responsible" bloggers repeat the GOP line. Look at Kevin Drum on the "unitary executive":

It's true that the principle of the "unitary executive" was first promoted aggressively by the Reagan and Bush Sr. White Houses, but as Christopher Kelley, a political science professor at Miami of Ohio, noted in a paper last year, "President Clinton did more to move the executive branch agencies closer to White House control than either the Reagan or Bush presidencies." It was Clinton who "accepted and perfected" the notion of a unitary executive.

For crissakes Kevin. That is NOT the issue. It is the John Yoo/George Bush version of the unitary executive that is the issue. Control over the EPA, etc. by the White House may merit a discussion, but the "unitary executive" issue we face NOW is this one:

The executive branch shall construe Title X in Division A of the Act, relating to detainees, in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power, which will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President, evidenced in Title X, of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks.
The Bybee Memo put it this way:

Any effort by the Congress to regulate the interrogation of battlefield combatants would violate the Constitution's sole vesting of the Commander in Chief authority in the President. . . . Congress can no more interfere with the President's conduct of the interrogation of enemy combatants than it can dictate strategic or tactical decisions on the battlefield.

Under Bush, the "unitary executive" means the President as King when acting as Commander in Chief. No modern President has made such a sweeping claim. But Kevin Drum will "responsibly" tell you otherwise. And you know what? The Media will do the same.

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