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Post by blueneck on Apr 20, 2008 5:09:01 GMT -6
In perhaps the most embarrassing performance by the media in a major presidential debate in years, ABC News hosts Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos focused mainly on trivial issues as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama faced off in Philadelphia. They, and their network, should hang their collective heads in shame.
Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the health care and mortgage crises, the overall state of the economy and dozens of other pressing issues had to wait for their few moments in the sun as Obama was pressed to explain his recent "bitter" gaffe and relationship with Rev. Wright (seemingly a dead issue) and not wearing a flag pin -- while Clinton had to answer again for her Bosnia trip exaggerations.
Then it was back to Obama to defend his slim association with a former '60s radical -- a question that came out of right-wing talk radio and Sean Hannity on TV, but was delivered by former Bill Clinton aide Stephanopoulos. This approach led to a claim that Clinton's husband pardoned two other '60s radicals. And so on. The travesty continued.
More time was spent on all of this than segments on getting out of Iraq and keeping people from losing their homes and -- you name it. Gibson only got excited complaining that someone might raise his capital gains tax. Yet neither candidate had the courage to ask the moderators to turn to those far more important issues. Talking heads on other networks followed up by not pressing that point either. The crowd booed Gibson near the end. Why didn't every other responsible journalist on TV?
To top it off, here is David Brooks' review at the New York Times: "I thought the questions were excellent." He gives ABC an "A." Of course, "A" can stand for many things.
Read more reactions from Huffington Post bloggers to ABC's Pennsylvania Democratic debate
Greg Mitchell is author of the new book, So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits -- and the President -- Failed on Iraq. It has been hailed by Bill Moyers, Glenn Greenwald, Arianna Huffington and many others and features a preface by Bruce Springsteen. Mitchell is editor of Editor & Publisher. Email: gmitchell@editorandpublisher.com.
www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-mitchell/the-debate-a-shameful-nig_b_97122.html
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Post by proletariat on Apr 20, 2008 6:39:51 GMT -6
I find it hard to take anything out of Obama's Huffington Post too seriously. Huffington spent most of the 90's attacking the Clinton's for the silliest things.
I thought the questions were right on, not for the sake of substance, but for Obama's electability. It was more clear to me after the debate that Obama could never win in November.
While the questions themselves had little or no relevance, how he answered them did. The flag question is a case in point, he said he never said he wouldn't wear a pin when in fact he did at the beginning of the campaign.
I listened to a Clinton last night and she appears to be reading my blog. She has at least rhetorically gone further than Edwards ever did. Maybe she took Edwards seriously on the Colbert Report. Edward's wife certainly is leaning towards Hillary. Like most of us, except those in Obama land, she sees universal health care as the lower limit of reform.
Now, Hillary will have to go a long to get my vote. I am pretty solidly with Nader. But, if a Democrat in the White House is the destiny I'd much rather have a fighting Hillary that a bipartisanshipping Obama.
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Post by blueneck on Apr 20, 2008 6:48:04 GMT -6
Where's this "fighting" Hillary thing you keep talking about? where was the fight as she rolled (and continues to) over to Bush on Iran and Iraq? where the "fight" when she was pro "free" trade until it became politically inconvenient for her. Her senate record is one of going along with the status quo - not challenging the right
I am really tiring of the pro Hillary slant this site is taking on, it is completely non-reality based
The Clinton's are the very embodiment of the DLC , something you should be appalled by, proletariat. At least Obama is representing the left wing of the party, albeit the effete limousine part of the left, but the left none the less and in my book thats marginally better than the DINO DLC'ers
Back to the topic at hand- yes indeed this was an embarrassment for the corporate media - focusing on triviality over substance. I could care less about radical preachers (Falwell and Robertson offend me far more than Wright) or superficial shows of "yellow ribbon" patriotism on an SUV that the lapel pin represents or a 60's radical (Obama was just a child in the 60's for pete's sake).
Tell me more about trade, and health care, alternative energy ,getting the deficits under control, and ending the war -this is the stuff that really matters - and shame on both candidates for not redirecting the discussion to the real issues
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Post by proletariat on Apr 20, 2008 8:43:41 GMT -6
I lean towards Hillary in the lessor evil frame. I will also concur that Hillary has taken positions on trade that are unacceptable. With that said she has rhetorically taken positions on trade more labor friendly than even John Edwards. If I am "pro hillary" it is very cautiously, and will be curious to how her positions play out in the general.
The very fact that Reich went with Obama is very telling. It says that even neo liberal, free trading, DLC types are beginning to take her rhetoric seriously. All of Obama's central advisers are free trading DLCers. The central advisor - Goolsby - is a highly acclaimed DLC senior fellow. This is the same clown giving Obama speak to the Canadians.
I don't think Hillary can go quite as far as she has and then rule like a neo liberal DLCer. In addition the very fact that she drew a line in the sand on health care would give her a mandate Obama never would have. In a surprising twist of fate it was actually Obama who mastered the DLC triangulation strategy.
I do agree with you about the issues and that is why I part ways with Obama. He has about every free trading Clinton official in his camp now. He gots the likes of Boren who must line in some alternative universe where Democrats have balls. The major problem of the last years has been bipartisanship not the lack of it.
I detest Obama so much because he reminds of Bill Clinton. I do think Hillary and Bill are different political creatures. As Armey said Obama is much more like Bill, they just want the office. Hillary on the other hand has a blue print of exactly what she wants to do. If one must roll the dice I am more confident in the specifics of Hillary that the empty rhetoric of Obama.
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Post by graybeard on Apr 20, 2008 10:33:21 GMT -6
Nearly all the media has fouced on Obama's bitter "Guns and God," while I'm bothered more by the second half of the statement, his disparaging of those who are against free trade and illegal immigration.
Sleaze or slime, that's our choice.
GB
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Post by blueneck on Apr 20, 2008 13:30:03 GMT -6
The reason more and more are jumping ship from the clinton camp is she is losing, and some are disgusted with the dirty politics they are playing of which the ABC debate helped underscore.
It has more to do with losing than positions, which at least on the surface are only nuanced differences.
You should have heard Stephanopolis and his panel all patting themselves on the back today on This Week about what a great job the media did - it was pathetic.
GB - I am one of those small town midwesterners with blue collar roots- I was not in the least bit offended by Obama's statement - quite the contrary - I was glad someone finally had the courage and spoke the truth about politicians cynically using the 3 G's to divide and get people to vote against their economic interests. If anything this makes me lean more to Obama - not away from him
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Apr 20, 2008 16:12:23 GMT -6
Nearly all the media has focused on Obama's bitter "Guns and God," while I'm bothered more by the second half of the statement, his disparaging of those who are against free trade and illegal immigration. GB That's exactly where my problem comes from with Obama's statement — trade and illegal immigration — and the wage and employment losses caused. The most important inference I drew from Obama's statement was that Pennsylvanians were unjustified in their anti-immigrant and anti-trade "sentiment." Combining that statement with his earlier NAFTA mis-step, and his favoring driver's licenses for illegal immigrants, made the Pennsylvanian comments more damaging. I agree that far too much of the debate focused on trivial issues. Though I concur that "hard questions" needed to be asked, I didn't agree with the choice hard questions that were asked. To hear the questions, one might have thought they were listening to a Republican debate. It was all guns, religion, patriotism, and "tax-cuts-are-next-to-godliness." Both candidates seemed reticent to take much of a populist stand on Bush's reverse Robin Hood tax cuts. Rolling back the tax cuts on those making over $250K (maybe) was the best they could do. From their positions on taxes, you'd think the only voters they were worried about are those in the top quintile. Both let Gibson's fairy-tale insinuation stand, that cutting taxes on the rich increases tax revenue. That assertion has been repeatedly and overwhelmingly disproved. But neither of them called Gibson on that. (Are the only Pennsylvanians registered to vote making over $100K per year?) Obama missed a great opportunity to score big on the cap on Social Security taxes (and a chance to score big with the 85%+ of Americans with incomes below the cap.) Obama's initial position was better than Clinton's, who clearly stated she would not raise the cap. And though Obama had already stated he favored raising the cap, he started back-peddling. He let Gibson put him on the defensive, and started sounding less committed to raising the cap. I was surprised by Clinton's clear-cut, "non-populist" position on the Social Security cap. She left Obama a hole big enough to drive a truck through. But Obama put the truck in neutral, and started rolling backward from his initial, more "populist," position. One female commentator's post-debate "pseudo-critique" hit the nail on the head (though she drove the nail in the wrong direction.) Her misguided criticism helped clinched it . Though she correctly stated that the "real" issues weren't covered, she in-correctly identified them as health care, education, college tuition, etc. The commentator's "real issues" all involved increasing taxpayer funding for government programs, instead of increasing the taxable income base for the funding. None of her critique involved increasing American income or increasing wealth, only on how to spend more of it. To me, the real issues are summed up by James Carville's original statement "It's the economy, stupid." The biggest issues are economic. The biggest economic issues pertain to employment, wages, and income. The main focus should be on increasing American employment and wages, while protecting retirees' income. (Income that retirees have already earned, by it's deduction from their previously-earned wages.) The emphasis should be on preserving & increasing the income & wealth of working Americans and retirees, not how to spend more tax revenue, as this commentator implied. Such a focus would've led to a discussion of income & employment-suppressing issues — such as outsourcing, illegal immigration, union busting, pension preservation, and inflation. Without income, there's no tax revenue to pay for the goodies this misguided commentator claimed were the "real issues." Without income, there's no consumer spending to provide production demand, labor demand, and employment income. Without income, there is no tax base to fund any of these goodies. Increasing the earnings of the majority of Americans needs to come first, before "funding" of new programs is even considered. Enhancing the earning power of the majority of Americans should be the major focus of any Democratic debate. Instead, however, viewers were treated to a Republican-lite debate between the two Democratic Presidential candidates. Though this was more the fault of the moderators than the candidates themselves, both candidates should have worked harder at redirecting the dialogue — like Dennis Kucinich did when he was in the debates. Guns, religion, lapel pins, "sniper fire", and the Weather Underground might be issues in the November general election. But the DEMOCRATIC primaries aren't over. And the DEMOCRATIC nominee has not yet been determined. The candidates need to win over Democrats first — before even getting the chance to win over Republicans. Somehow, this point seems to have been forgotten.
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Post by proletariat on Apr 20, 2008 16:45:28 GMT -6
Obama missed a great opportunity to score big on the cap on Social Security taxes (and a chance to score big with the 85%+ of Americans with incomes below the cap.) Obama's initial position was better than Clinton's, who clearly stated she would not raise the cap. And though Obama had already stated he favored raising the cap, he started back-peddling. He let Gibson put him on the defensive, and started sounding less committed to raising the cap.
I was surprised by Clinton's clear-cut, "non-populist" position on the Social Security cap. She left Obama a hole big enough to drive a truck through. But Obama put the truck in neutral, and started rolling backward from his initial, more "populist," position.
While I would tend to be closer to Obama's cap position, I "read" this as part of the tax discussion. This was seen in how Gibson jumped on Obama as soon as he mentioned the caps. Obama lost the only $200,000 an above tax discussion, I can't remember if they actually pledged. I think Clinton was thinking "general" and knew the question had nothing to do with Social Security and everything to do with taxes.
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Post by db on Apr 20, 2008 17:54:31 GMT -6
MSM knows no shame, a bunch of corporate whores.
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Post by blueneck on Apr 20, 2008 20:38:30 GMT -6
Here is what Frank Rich has to say about it in the NYT By FRANK RICH Published: April 20, 2008 “THE crowd is turning on me,” said Charles Gibson, the ABC anchor, when the audience jeered him in the final moments of Wednesday night’s face-off between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
I can’t remember a debate in which the only memorable moment was the audience’s heckling of a moderator. Then again, I can’t remember a debate that became such an instant national gag, earning reviews more appropriate to a slasher movie like “Prom Night” than a civic event held in Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center:
“Shoddy, despicable!” — The Washington Post
“A tawdry affair!” — The Boston Globe
“A televised train wreck!” — The Philadelphia Daily News
And those were the polite ones. Let’s not even go to the blogosphere.
Of course, Obama fans were angry because of the barrage of McCarthyesque guilt-by-association charges against their candidate, portraying him as a fellow traveler of bomb-throwing, America-hating, flag-denigrating terrorists. The debate’s co-moderator, George Stephanopoulos, second to no journalist in his firsthand knowledge of the Clinton White House, could have easily rectified the imbalance. All he had to do was draw on his expertise to ask similar questions about Bill Clinton’s check-bearing business and foundation associates circling a potential new Clinton administration. He did not.
But viewers of all political persuasions were affronted by the moderators’ failure to ask about the mortgage crisis, health care, the environment, torture, education, China policy, the pending G.I. bill to aid veterans, or the war we’re losing in Afghanistan. Those minutes were devoted not just to recycling the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Bosnian sniper fire and another lame question about a possible “dream ticket” but to the unseemly number of intrusive commercials and network promos that prompted the jeering at the end. The trashiest ads often bumped directly into an ABC announcer’s periodic recitations of quotations from the Constitution. Such defacing of American values is to be expected, I guess, from a network whose debate moderators refuse to wear flag pins.
Ludicrous as the whole spectacle was, ABC would not have been so widely pilloried had it not tapped into a larger national discontent with news media fatuousness. The debate didn’t happen in a vacuum; it was the culmination of the orgy of press hysteria over Mr. Obama’s remarks about “bitter” small-town voters. For nearly a week, you couldn’t change channels without hearing how Mr. Obama had destroyed his campaign with this single slip at a San Francisco fund-raiser. By Wednesday night, the public was overdosing.
Mr. Obama did sound condescending, an unappealing trait that was even more naked in his “You’re likable enough, Hillary” gibe many debates ago. But the overreaction to this latest gaffe backfired on the media more than it damaged him. For all the racket about “Bittergate” — and breathless intimations of imminent poll swings and superdelegate stampedes — the earth did not move. The polls hardly budged, and superdelegates continued to migrate mainly in Mr. Obama’s direction.
Thus did another overhyped 2008 story line go embarrassingly bust, like such predecessors as the death of the John McCain campaign and the organizational and financial invincibility of the Clinton political machine against a rookie senator from Illinois. Not the least of the reasons that the Beltway has gotten so much wrong this year is that it believes that 2008 is still 1988. It sees the country in its own image — static — instead of as a dynamic society whose culture and demographics are changing by the day.
In this one-size-fits-all analysis, Mr. Obama must be the new Dukakis, sure to be rejected by white guys easily manipulated by Lee Atwater-style campaigns exploiting race and class. But some voters who lived through 1988 have changed, and quite a few others are dead. In 2008, they are supplanted in part by an energized African-American electorate and the young voters of all economic strata who fueled the Obama movement that many pundits didn’t take seriously before Iowa. And that some still don’t. Cokie Roberts of ABC predicted in February that young voters probably won’t show up in November because “they never have before” and “they’ll be tired.”
However out of touch Mr. Obama is with “ordinary Americans,” many Americans, ordinary and not, have concluded that the talking heads blathering about blue-collar men, religion, guns and those incomprehensible “YouTube young people” are even more condescending and out of touch. When a Washington doyenne like Mary Matalin, freighted with jewelry, starts railing about elitists on “Meet the Press,” as she did last Sunday, it’s pure farce. It’s typical of the syndrome that the man who plays a raging populist on CNN, Lou Dobbs, dismissed Mr. Obama last week by saying “we don’t need another Ivy League-educated knucklehead.” Mr. Dobbs must know whereof he speaks, since he’s Harvard ’67.
The most revealing moment in Wednesday’s debate was a striking example of this media-populace disconnect.In Mr. Gibson’s only passionate query of the night, he tried to strong-arm both Democrats into forgoing any increases in the capital gains tax. The capital gains tax! That’s just the priority Americans are focusing on as they lose their houses and jobs, and as gas prices reach $4 a gallon (a subject that merited only a brief mention, in a lightning round of final questions). And this in a debate that took place on the same day we learned that the top 50 hedge fund managers made a total of $29 billion in 2007, some of them by betting against the mortgage market. At least Mr. Gibson is consistent. In the ABC debate in January, he upbraided Mrs. Clinton by suggesting that a typical New Hampshire “family of two professors” with a joint income “in the $200,000 category” would be unjustly penalized by her plan to roll back the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. He seemed oblivious not merely to typical academic salaries but to the fact that his hypothetical household would be among America’s wealthiest (only 3.4 percent earn more).
Next to such knuckleheaded obtuseness, Mr. Obama’s pratfall may strike many voters as a misdemeanor. He was probably rescued as well by the typical Clinton campaign overkill that followed his mistake. Not content merely to piously feign shock about Mr. Obama’s San Francisco soliloquy (and the operative political buzzword here is San Francisco, which stands for you-know-what), Mrs. Clinton couldn’t resist presenting herself as an unambiguously macho, beer-swilling hunting enthusiast. This is as condescending as it gets, topping even Mitt Romney’s last-ditch effort to repackage himself to laid-off union workers as the love child of Joe Hill and Norma Rae.
The video of Mrs. Clinton knocking back drinks in an Indiana bar drowned out the scratchy audio of Mr. Obama’s wispy words in San Francisco. Her campaign didn’t seem to recognize that among the many consequences of the Bush backlash is a revulsion against such play acting. Americans belatedly learned the hard way that the brush-clearing cowboy of the Crawford “ranch” (it’s a country house, not a working ranch) was in reality an entitled Andover-Yale-Harvard oil brat whose arrogance has left us where we are now. Voters don’t want a rerun from a Wellesley-Yale alumna who served on the board of Wal-Mart.
Privileged though they are, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama do want to shape policy to help the less well-heeled. Mr. McCain, who had a far more elite upbringing than either of them and whose wife’s estimated fortune exceeds the Clintons’, is not just condescending to working Americans but trying to hoodwink them. Next week, in a replay of the 2000 Bush campaign’s “compassionate conservative” photo ops among black schoolchildren, he will show he’s a “different kind of Republican” by visiting what he calls the “forgotten” America of Alabama’s “black belt” and the old steel town of Youngstown, Ohio. What he wants voters to forget is the inequity of his new economic plan.
That plan’s incoherent smorgasbord of items includes a cut from 35 percent to 25 percent in the corporate tax rate. For noncorporate taxpayers, Mr. McCain offers such thin gruel as a battle against federal pork (the notorious Alaskan “bridge to nowhere,” earmarked for $223 million in federal highway money, costs less than a day of the war in Iraq) and a temporary suspension of the federal gas tax (a saving of some $2.75 per 15-gallon tank). Now there’s a reason for voters to be bitter — assuming bloviators start publicizing and parsing Mr. McCain’s words as relentlessly as they do the Democrats’.
That may be a big assumption. At an Associated Press luncheon for newspaper editors in Washington last week, Mr. McCain was given a standing ovation. (The other candidate who appeared, Mr. Obama, was not.) Cindy McCain, whose tax returns remain under wraps, has not received remotely the same scrutiny as Michelle Obama and Bill Clinton, except for her plagiarized recipes. The most damning proof of the press’s tilt toward Mr. McCain, though, is the lack of clamor for his complete health records, especially in the wake of his baffling serial factual confusions about Iraq, his No. 1 issue.
But that remains on hold while we resolve whether Mr. Obama lost Wednesday’s debate with his defensive stumbling, or whether Mrs. Clinton lost it with her ceaseless parroting of right-wing attacks. The unequivocally good news is that ABC’s debacle had the largest audience of any debate in this campaign. That’s a lot of viewers who are now mad as hell and won’t take it anymore. www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/opinion/20rich.html?_r=1&ex=1366430400&en=355caba0001030c8&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=&oref=slogin
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