BY DAN
KENNEDY
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Friday, January 30, 2004
The Great Kerry Debate, Round
3. Jon Keller and I continue
to slog it out over John Kerry at the New Republic website.
I've weighed in twice, and Keller once; he's supposed to come back at
me this afternoon.
Quote of the day. "Other
presidents would have liked to bully the C.I.A., stonewall
investigations and give huge contracts to their friends without
oversight. They knew, however, that they couldn't. What has gone
wrong with our country that allows this president to get away with
such things?" - Paul
Krugman, in today's New
York Times.
So old it's new again. John
Ellis was way too quick to award his "Dean
as Dot.Com" metaphor prize
to political consultant Craig Crawford. Logically, shouldn't the
award go to the last person to use what has become a mindless
cliché? If so, how about Andrés
Martinez in today's
Times? "Howard Dean's implosion calls to mind the fate of too
many high-flying dot-com companies in the wake of the 2000-2001
crash," Martinez "informs" us.
Actually, not only is the metaphor
lame, but it's wrong. I recall seeing an exit poll from Iowa (Media
Log is too lazy to look it up) showing that, of caucus-goers who made
up their minds by researching the candidates' websites, Kerry
won. It's as though Jeff Bezos's nightmare finally came true:
that Barnes & Noble had come up with a website that kicked
Amazon.com's ass.
The Dean campaign isn't a dot-com
that went bust. It's a dot-com that fell asleep while its biggest
bricks-and-mortar rival figured out a way to beat it at its own game.
It's - no! enough! I don't want Ellis to make fun of me,
too.
Tuning in. Mediachannel.org,
running on fumes not all that many months ago, is doing all kinds of
cool stuff these days that Media Log has not had time to keep up
with. Anyway, pay
a visit. And read
this
piece by Timothy Karr on
the media's obsession with the horse race over substance.
And now, for an opposing view. In
theory, we should all be rapturously in favor of a focus on "the
issues." In fact, it's not quite that simple. Yes, we should know
that Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich, and Al Sharpton opposed the war
and that John Kerry, John Edwards, and Joe Lieberman were in favor.
(God only knows what Wesley Clark really thinks. And by all means, insert your own 500 words' worth of Kerry caveats here.)
But let's take one of the more
nebulous issues Karr cites: health care. The media could, I imagine,
dwell at great length and in great detail on how Kerry's plan differs
from Dean's, and how Dean's, in turn, differs from the single-payer
system favored by Kucinich and Sharpton. But is that really
what the media ought to be focusing on?
The fact is that all of the
Democratic candidates have serious plans to do something significant
about the 43 million Americans who are uninsured. I have no doubt
that some plans are better than others. I also have no doubt that, if
one of them is fortunate enough to become president, he will start
rewriting his plan as soon as he moves into the White House. I
don't care. I just want to be assured that the person I vote for
is serious about solving the problem.
Where the media fall down is in
giving a pass to candidates who aren't serious. In the 2000
debates, for example, the wretched moderator, Jim Lehrer, cut off a
discussion of prescription-drug benefits by telling Al Gore and
George W. Bush that, since each had a plan to deal with the issue, it
was time to move on. As Jack Beatty observed on the Atlantic
Monthly's website (sorry; can't find the link), Lehrer completely
missed the fact that Gore had an actual plan, whereas Bush had
nothing but a few patched-together talking points so that he could
bluff his way through. We saw that last year, when Bush finally put
together a bill that had more to do with further enriching Big Pharma
than with helping any actual elderly people. Lehrer gave Bush exactly
the pass he was looking for.
But does anyone seriously doubt
that the Democratic presidential candidates intend to address the
health-care crisis? Of course they do. The eye-glazing details can
wait.
New in this week's
Phoenix. John Kerry has staged one of the most impressive
comebacks in modern politics. Can he sustain
the momentum through the
South? (Yes! More horse-race coverage!)
Also, CBS
caves - again - to its
benefactors in the White House over its refusal to air the MoveOn.org
ad.
posted at 12:10 PM |
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MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
