BY DAN
KENNEDY
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Monday, February 09, 2004
Winning by losing. Jay Rosen
is among the more thoughtful observers of media today. A leading
light in the fading "public journalism" movement and chairman of the
journalism department at New York University, he writes a weblog -
"Pressthink"
- that is part of the online community "Blogging
of the President."
Recently Rosen wrote
this
post on an encounter he'd
witnessed between CNN's Wolf Blitzer and Ohio congressman Dennis
Kucinich. Rosen was repulsed by Blitzer's focus on horse-race
questions, and on his repeated badgering of Kucinich as to why he's
doing so badly in the presidential campaign and why he doesn't just
get out of the race. Rosen writes:
When the press looks for
its credibility problems today, it ought to look more at moments
like these. To me, it's in-credible, Blitzer's question. The
public service validity I assign it is zero. Most of the audience,
most of the time, senses the bad faith in it, whether we "like"
Kucinich or not. In a catalogue of low points for the campaign
press (which, done well, is an idea for a kick-ass weblog... )
this was one.
Political man gives it his best
shot. He runs in order to speak to the country, and to see if the
country listens and responds. It is for others to say why he
failed when he is still in the campaign to succeed.
Intuitively we know this. Blitzer, in a boorish way, does
not.
What I find fascinating about
Rosen's post is that he gets an important point half-right. Yes, the
media are generally dreadful to candidates who can't garner much
support, alternately ignoring them or mocking them. Yet Kucinich has
essentially invited the Blitzer's "boorish" behavior by playing the
game of mainstream expectations rather than trying to rise above
it.
As a presidential candidate,
Kucinich has worn well, at least with me. At first, I saw him as
little more than a Ralph Nader wanna-be - a fringe pain in the ass
with nothing interesting to say and no record of accomplishment,
unless you count throwing the city of Cleveland into default as its
boy mayor a generation ago an accomplishment.
But he's shown that he's a serious
candidate of ideas. He forced me to go back and look
at his record in Cleveland.
It turns out he sacrificed his mayoralty over a principled refusal to
give in to the banks and sell the city's municipal power plant - not
smart, perhaps, but certainly courageous.
Kucinich's plan to sit down with
the UN and negotiate a transfer of power in Iraq - about which he
straightened
out Tom Brokaw at the
January 29 debate - is reasonable and sensible, a far cry from the
cut-and-run caricature it has usually been portrayed as.
As for a Department
of Peace, well, why
not?
Where Kucinich continues to annoy
me is when he espouses his increasingly absurd scenarios for how he's
going to win. For instance, here is Kucinich's response to Brokaw's
why-don't-you-get-out question at the
last debate:
Well, Tom, keep in mind,
there's so much talent on this stage that I believe this race is
going to go all the way to the convention. And what that means -
no one's going to get 50 percent of the delegates going to the
convention. And I expect to be able to pick up delegates, state by
state. And I'll arrive at the convention right in the mix for the
nomination, and I look forward to it.
He's still going to win! Contrast
this with the Reverend Al Sharpton's response to the same question,
the highlight of which was this: "They ought to want all of us to
stay in and bring our constituency to the table rather than try to
eliminate."
Sharpton is being realistic and
truthful: he's running for a place at the table. Kucinich is in la-la
land.
The problem here is that Kucinich
knew he wasn't going to win the day he announced, and everyone - Wolf
Blitzer and Tom Brokaw included - knows Kucinich knows he isn't going
to win. So when Blitzer acts "boorish" and Brokaw is dismissive,
they are, in at least some small way, reacting to the intellectual
contempt that Kucinich is showing not just to them, but to their
audiences as well.
Kucinich did
pretty good in Maine
yesterday, but he still has just
two delegates.
A far more honest - and disarming -
answer to Blitzer's question would have been this:
Wolf, I know I'm not
going to win. I'm running to give a voice to people who are rarely
heard from: the poor, the disenfranchised, the working-class
families who've been hurt by our so-called free-trade policies.
And I'm running to stand up against war. No one in this race, not
even Howard Dean, is as committed to peace as I am. Like Al
Sharpton, I want a place at the table. I want to help change my
party, to make it a better, more principled vehicle for
progressive aspirations. Four years ago we lost the presidency
because too many voters saw Ralph Nader as a better alternative to
Al Gore. We need to bring those people back inside the tent. And
that's what I'm going to do.
What would Blitzer have said to
that? "But you're still losing"? Perhaps. But at least viewers would
have understood what Kucinich is really fighting for. And Blitzer
would have been more fully exposed for asking a buffoonish, bullying
question.
posted at 10:08 AM |
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Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
