Posted by
Always To The Right on Tuesday, October 14, 2008 2:08:37 PM
Jonah Goldberg writes today that a candidate named Barry O’Malley,
running for President with Barack Obama’s record and level of
experience, would get laughed off the national stage. Why has Obama
succeeded where others would have disappeared long before the first
primary? Identity politics, and it’s Republicans who have pulled their punches as a result
On the experience issue, I’m not so certain Jonah’s right. Had John
Edwards never made two significant runs for the Presidency and got
nominated for VP with less experience than Obama or Sarah Palin, I
might be inclined to agree. Obama and Edwards seem to epitomize a
desire for outsiders that has turned almost into a fetish — but
outsiders with national name recognition in politics. It’s hard to
imagine anyone more outside than Sarah Palin, and she has
actual executive experience (as opposed to Obama and Edwards), but gets
treated like a hick because she’s from Alaska instead of the eastern
seaboard.
Jonah is more correct when it comes to a media double standard on
race and politics. Ironically, the Clintons felt no such need to pull
punches. Hillary’s campaign made an issue of Jeremiah Wright, for
instance, after Hillary spent February mostly eating Obama’s dust. Her
campaign also circulated the photo of Obama wearing traditional African
garb on a trip to Kenya. The result? She won most of the rest of the
Democratic primaries and forced Obama to limp to the finish line.
Hillary, though, did not have one obstacle that John McCain faces in
this election: the national media. The punditocracy has excoriated
McCain for his supposedly racially-divisive campaign even without
making Hillary’s arguments again. Somehow, as Jonah notes, they have
made William Ayers into a racial issue, even though Ayers is as
Caucasian as McCain. They have passed along without any criticism the
rantings of John Lewis, who compared McCain and Palin to George Wallace
(the Wall Street Journal being a rare mainstream-media exception).
Meanwhile, Obama has explicitly played the race card a number of
times this summer. He personally accused the McCain campaign of racism
twice, only stopping when his surrogates managed to do it more
effectively, like Kathleen Sebelius
and John Lewis. With the exception of one time each by the Washington
Post and ABC News (on their blogs), the media did nothing to expose
this tactic by Obama and his campaign on these occasions:
So yes, I agree with Jonah that Obama has had an easy ride on the
basis of identity politics — but that’s not really the fault of the
McCain campaign. Unfortunately, the media has a glaringly obvious
double standard on how it treats the two candidates. McCain could
ignore this, of course, but he risks the damage that the media can do
with the vast majority of voters who don’t bother to work around the
media to discover the truth on their own. As Rick Moran
notes, the McCarthyite tactic of accusing opponents of latent racism
has no rebuttal that works well in mass-media applications. With three
weeks to go to the election, McCain has to work within that reality if
he expects to win a national election.