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Sorry, my dear. He always was a smacked ass.

How the Media Blew the Midterm

The media narrative by now is set in concrete: The voters are teed off, rising up, mad as hell and ready to wreak havoc. [Kewl]

There is a whiff, if you read between the lines, that the expected outcome is somehow unjust. [Huh?] The Democrats are going to get their backsides handed to them, in this telling, because the Obama administration has clumsily failed to explain what it’s done for the folks, and because of slightly scary passions unleashed by the Tea Party crazies. [Let's repeat that: "Slightly scary passions unleashed by Tea Party crazies." It's scary to object to multi-trillion dollar deficits. It's crazy to want a smaller federal government. Got it. Thanks, HOWARD.]

The journalistic tone was somewhat different in 2006, when exasperated voters handed the House and Senate to the Dems, and 2008, when Barack Obama sold himself as a post-partisan savior.[Different? Really? Ya think?]

I’m not saying this is intentional [of course not], or that the MSM are mangling the midterms.[No, no, no, no, no, I'd never say that...] Many voters are angry, especially about the anemic economy, and it’s their right to toss out whoever they deem to be the bums. But on some level, many journalists believe the White House has accomplished a heckuva lot [uh, yeah, we know many journalists believe that; and you left the Post for the Beast, why?]  and they see the Tea Partiers as inchoate and maddeningly inconsistent—denouncing big bad government while clinging to their Medicare and Social Security benefits. [Tired of this liberal touchstone. You force us into a system and then denounce us when we object because we take the crumbs we're allowed. Doesn't mean we ever liked what we were forced to accept.] It’s as if the pundits are collectively engaged in a group grope, feeling their way around this strange and sharp-toothed political animal that resembles nothing they’ve encountered before. ["Nothing we've ever encountered before." Yawn. Nothing rhey've ever bothered to cover as journalists before. How could that be? WE DON'T LIKE YOU, DON'T TRUST YOU, DON'T TALK TO YOU. And fortunately for us, you rarely ask. News Flash: We think you journalists are lefty assholes. Whatcha gonna do about THAT, Howie?]

Few have gone as far as the late (and usually great) Peter Jennings, explaining the 1994 Gingrich takeover by declaring that “the voters had a temper tantrum.” [Unlike the tantrum Jennings had on 9/11, questioning the courage of his president while the Secret Service was fighting a losing battle to keep him away from the White House. What a man, er, clothes horse.] But news organizations were late to the Tea Party phenomenon, and are still grappling to explain it—in part because of its amorphous and unofficial nature. [Always upsetting when voters are "unofficial."] They were blindsided by Scott Brown’s win and Lisa Murkowski’s loss. [Something about pros versus amateurs? Maybe this will help.]

“The media profile is of an angry, racist rabble, and that doesn’t match the people I’ve seen in focus groups,” says Republican pollster Whit Ayres, describing the Tea Party movement. “There’s a predisposition in the more liberal elements of the media to paint Republicans as unsophisticated rubes who don’t appreciate all the wonderful things the Obama administration and the Democratic Party have done for the country. It’s just out of touch with the reality.” [Check.]

For Jano Cabrera, a Democratic strategist, the subject strikes a nerve. “My wife and I were having this very conversation,” he says. “When we were trying to seize power, we had justified anger, and now we talk about uninformed voters.” Obama inherited unprecedented challenges, Cabrera says, but in politics “you can’t go back and say it’s the other guy’s fault.” [Awwwww. Except that your guy keeps doing it, and doing and doing it, and...]

[This] is a year in which facts—the preferred currency of the reality-based media [Huh? Reality-based? Did I miss the memo?]—often don’t seem to matter. Journalists report that Sharron Angle had favored privatizing Social Security, spoke of people considering “Second Amendment remedies” and counseled rape victims to turn “a lemon situation into lemonade” by giving birth—and she’s still competitive with Harry Reid. [Hey. Let's lynch her. A corrupt liar would be ever so much better.]  Media outlets report that Christine O’Donnell, the onetime witchcraft dabbler [Fuck you, Howie], opposes masturbation [at one time, or is everything present tense with you, Howie?. Which must mean Obama is a cokehead, right?] and considers evolution “a myth,” [as do many serious scientists] and she laughs it off (while trailing in the race). [If we asked you why you bailed on the Post, dying from its own liberal poison, would you answer or laugh it off? Just so.] New York gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino calls gay pride parades “disgusting,”[they are, as even you know after a beer or two]  hurls baseless charges about Andrew Cuomo’s sex life (after fathering a child out of wedlock himself) and tells a New York Post columnist “I’ll take you out”—and still hasn’t been laughed out of the race. [Let's see. After Spitzer and Bubba, would you stake your life, Howie, on Andrew Cuomo's marital fidelity? Your life?]

The biggest media blunder, in my view, was the walk-on-water coverage that Obama drew in 2007 and 2008. [When did this insight come to you, Howard? Yesterday? Last week? Last month? At any rate, really fucking brilliant insight.]

Who, after all, has absorbed more abuse from the “lamestream media” than Sarah Palin, who can hit back with a Facebook post that bypasses the old gatekeepers? [Excuse me? How does this point follow from the previous point? Oh. Thank you. It doesn't. It's just a standard liberal brain fart.]

In such a topsy-turvy season, one simple solution is… blaming the voters! They are so caught up in faulting Obama for everything but bad weather, so mesmerized by the right-wing noise machine that they can’t see straight. [Okay. Finally getting it. Your deal with the Post required you to leave your brain behind with your keyboard. People who have no jobs and object to trillions of dollars of debt shoveled onto the shoulders of their kids and grandkids are simply dupes of the "the rightwing noise machine." Did you even go to college, Howie?] Yes, the refrain goes, high unemployment is heartbreaking, but do people really think they’re going to do better under Speaker Boehner and Majority Leader McConnell? [uh, yeah.]

Small problem: These are the same voters who broke with more than two centuries of Oval Office white men by electing Obama. Weren’t many of us praising their judgment and tolerance then? (Yes, I know they’re not the exact same voters, in that turnout is smaller in off-years and many disaffected Democrats are likely to stay home. And Obama, like Ronald Reagan, swept in many party colleagues who could not survive in marginal districts once the wave receded.) [Excuse me. What the fuck does the term 'white men' have to do with anything you've mentioned thus far?]

On the merits, journalists are right that Obama’s accomplishments have been minimized. [Journalists are right? On the merits? On the merits? Since when? Are these the same journalists who sold the American public on an absentee state legislator as president of the United States? Those journalists? Really?]  Health care reform, however it pans out, was a huge achievement [Achievement how? As in curing cancer? Or dissolving the Reichstag? They're both achievements, but maybe not equally desirable]; the overall package remains unpopular [fancy that...], the individual parts (such as not excluding kids for preexisting conditions) not so much [Kids. The only thing we're supposed to care about? Guess what. People care about other things, "such as" their own lives, HOWARD. God, you make me sick.]  Tightening financial regulation was a heavy lift against the forces of Wall Street. [Give me a fucking break. Goldman Sachs wrote that law.] Even the much-derided stimulus law saved plenty of jobs.[Did it, Howard? Did it, really? You're a fucking lunatic, you are. The only jobs saved were government jobs, which is nice for the government employees, but that is NOT stimulus. It's just government spending. I'm making a note right now to myself to look if and where you ever went to college. Before I do that I already know that when it comes to economics you're every bit as dumb as you look on TV.]

All that has been overshadowed because many voters believe the president bobbled the economy while setting his sights on social engineering. [Aww. Stupid, stupid voters.] But here, too, the short attention span of today’s journalism played a role. The health care and banking battles were covered ad nauseum, but once they passed, the press lost interest [maybe because somebody finally read the goddam bill and realized all the Obama-killing particulars within it] and moved on to mosque mess and the Koran-burning preacher and whatever other diversions were available. [You're an arrogant little prick, Howard. Your beloved MSM distracted ITSELF with all those stories. The rest of us kept our eyes on throwing the bums out. Which is why you're whining so incoherently right now.]

The biggest media blunder, in my view [HA!], was the walk-on-water coverage that Obama drew in 2007 and 2008. The only real debate was whether he was more like FDR (Time) or Lincoln (Newsweek). [Not true, asshole. Plenty of us were asking the right questions. You and your ass-kissing brethren simply refused to do your jobs.]  The candidate obviously played a role in creating his own myth, but it was the breathless media that sent expectations soaring into the stratosphere. Once Obama had to grapple with two wars, a crippled economy and reflexive Republican opposition [pullease], he had no place to go but down. The press has long since fallen out of love with the president, but the overheated hyperbole did him no favors.

Who’s to blame for the coming electoral tsunami? We ought to be careful about dumping on the most convenient scapegoat, those moronic voters. In politics, it’s not that complicated: you either deliver or you pay the price. [Right.]

posted at   1:08 pm  by  InstaPunk
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