Sympathy for the Clinton? (Or, our "press corps" momentarily stumbles onto a reality they prefer to ignore)

Hillary Clinton as Chris Matthews sees her in his dreams

I'm not going to pretend to sift through all the various issues about the New Hampshire polling in detail. I mainly want to call attention to a couple of things.

One is that it's nothing that new for polling in primaries to be significantly off. Now I know professional pollsters look at these things in more granular detail. And it does sound like the margins for Obama that the polls were showing as of two days before the vote wound up being further off the mark than usual. But I always assume that polls in primaries are less accurate than polls for the general election.

Why would this be so? Multiple candidates, for one thing. A more unpredictable level of voter participation, for another. In states with "open primaries" where any voter can vote in any party's primary, or in a case like New Hampshire where at least independents can vote in either primary, that adds more unpredictability. And if primaries have more than two significant contenders, as the early Presidential primaries for both parties normally do when there is not an incumbent President running for re-election, prediction becomes more complicated than in the normal general election situation with two candidates.

In the scramble for a new conventional wisdom to explain why the reporters and commentators who focused so heavily on the polling results for the "horse race", it's remarkable to me how many reporters and analysts seem to assume that the polls were right anyway and that something happened on Monday and Tuesday to swing the results. Isn't the most obvious explanation that the polls were just wrong?

Today's lead headline in the San Francisco Chronicle was Why polls in New Hampshire were so far off by Carla Marinucci, a reliable practitioner of the conventional "press corps" wisdom. A more meaningful question would be, why did the press and the punditocracy spend most of their time and reporting energy focusing on "horse race" polling statistics that turned out to be off-base instead of reporting on what the candidates were saying about the issues?

But that would require the press to turn a critical eye on their own typical behavior. And, as Bob Somerby says, the press scrupulously avoids criticizing their own conduct. Except...

One of the things that struck me about Marinucci's report is that the New Hampshire primary has produced a moment - likely brief - in which the press dysfunction became so blatant that even they can't hide their own little society's misconduct and lack of professionalism. Because in looking for the reason that those polls that they still assume were right anyway actually turned out to be wrong on voting day, their favorite emerging explanation seems to be that women voters switched to Clinton at the last minute out of sympathy for her. Which may well be the case, though that in itself wouldn't explain the missed polling predictions. I haven't seen any clear indication of this shift in the demographic breakdown of the vote that I've seen. And it's also not clear that any of the post-vote polling can say whether the supposed sympathy vote was more prevalent among women than men.

But it's taking the press a while to pivot that assumption into a narrative of how the cold, calculating witch-woman Clinton pulled it off with some deeply sinister scheming. And in the meantime, even as conventional a reporter as Marinucci hasn't been able to avoid mentioning just who or what provoked this supposed sympathy vote:

Garry South, a California Democratic political consultant, said that women - who proved crucial to Clinton's big win in New Hampshire - might simply have said "enough is enough" as they watched a parade of cable TV pundits, mostly male, all but pronounce Clinton's White House bid over in the final 48 hours of the campaign.

After the New York senator delivered a rare, emotional statement at a weekend campaign event, her voice nearly breaking, commentators began virtually nonstop analysis, suggesting that Clinton either was in the throes of a near-nervous breakdown or was making a shrewd bid for sympathy, he said.

"I think this is not totally a sisterhood kind of campaign, but women - whether they [w]ill vote for her or not - know (her campaign) is a very historic thing," South said. "And to have her treated in that kind of dismissive way by a bunch of white male buffoon talking heads had women ticked off. My gut feeling is ... they stormed to the polls. Something happened here." (my emphasis)

Again, it's not clear to me that the numbers actually show this effect having created a last-minute swing to Clinton.

But the surprising thing is to see in a front-page article a clear statement that voters could well have been reacting against the conduct of the press corps. Despite the significant role that especially TV news and commentary have in framing the political issues and events in the short run (and often in the not-so-short run), reporters following the accepted conventions know not to talk about their own profession's bad behavior.

And, yet, there it is, right there in Carla Marinucci's report! Someone is quoted as saying - near the top of the article even! - that "a parade of cable TV pundits, mostly male," had "all but pronounce[d] Clinton's White House bid over in the final 48 hours of the campaign". And that Clinton was treated in a "dismissive way by a bunch of white male buffoon talking heads".

It's probably true that none of the Establishment press figures can really compete with Chris Matthews' record over years of just plain weird hostility and obsession with Hillary Clinton. But I'd hate to see this phenomenon shoe-horned into a flabby conventional wisdom that it's just some niche of hormone-troubled women who react against manly men like Chris Matthews criticizing female candidates. Because female voters look at issues in elections as least as closely as male voters do. And neither a male nor female voter would need to consider themselves as particularly feminist-minded to see that much of the mainstream reporting on Clinton is downright demented and unfair. Plus it seems to me than in every Presidential election before this one, it was taken for granted that there was a certain amount of "sympathy for the underdog" factor in voting, especially in primaries, that could throw off polling predictions.

It will take much, much more for the dysfunction of the press to receive the kind of public attention it needs. But this incident does encourage me in one thought I've had for a while about Clinton's value as a Democratic candidate. Which is that unlike Obama and probably more so than Edwards, she's under no illusion about the kind of press hostility and misconduct she's going to face in the general election. She knows that she's going to have to fight the press dementia all along. And it's a good sign that her first primary victory has, even if only for a brief moment, forced the press corps to acknowledge that their own conduct has become a major factor in American politics.

Tags: carla marinucci, chris matthews, establishment press, hillary clinton, mainstream media, mainstream press

Mighty Mitt's polemic against the "religion of secularism"

This is a video of 08/05/07 in which Romney talks more specifics about the Mormon faith than he included in his much-discussed speech this week (for another segment from this interview, see the end of this post)

Some of the concepts in Mitt Romney's speech on religion, whose main point was that religious people should unite against vile, evil atheists and agnostics, had some really kooky ideas. The invaluable Joe Conason weighs in on the speech in Romney and Huckabee's religious intolerance Salon 12/07/07.

My own choice for particular bizarreness was his notion, "Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. ... Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone."

What can you even say about something like that? Do this man or his speechwriters have even the most superficial knowledge of the history of religion? The Christian religion, to take just one, managed to survive from the first century to the Enlightenment without much of anything like what we now think of as freedom of religion. And doesn't that contradict everything about the Republicans' new dogma that the "Islamofascists" are the greatest menace to freedom in the history of the universe? I mean, Victor Davis Hanson and other conservative columnists and pundits remind us regularly how Muslim nations violate freedom of religion and how Islam supposedly is hostile to freedom. If Romney's little formula is correct, and what the anti-"Islamofascists" say is true, shouldn't Islam have died out as a religion centuries ago? That little aphorism of Romney's is just so vapid it blows my mind.

And as far as the terrible menace of secularism: Look, if God exists, why would he or she or whatever be worried about people saying she doesn't exist? I mean, if you believe God is the Creator of the universe, do you really think he's so thin-skinned he's bothered by village atheists nitpicking favorite fundamentalist truisms?

It reminds me of the story about how, in 1954, on the 100th anniversary of Sigmund Freud's birth, an event was arranged in a major Anglican church in London to commemorate his life and work. Some people grumbled that maybe it wasn't appropriate for a church to host such an event honoring a man who, in his entire adult life until his death (by assisted suicide) in 1940, was an outspoken atheist.

The sponsors of the event put out a press release that said (quoting from memory), "We are quite sure that Mr. Freud is no longer an atheist."

Speaking of Freud, even though he was an atheist he had enormous respect for religion and studied religious matters closely. In his own education, his family had a Jewish edition of the Christian Bible at home when he was growing up, which included Jewish commentary on the Scriptures. Freud was very familiar with both the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. And that Bible edition's discussions of Biblical symbolism apparently was a major inspiration for his own analyses of symbolism in dreams and art.

Christians should pray for their fellow believers to take religion as seriously as the incorrigible atheist Freud did.

Digby (Wonder Working BS 12/06/07) and Salon's Joan Walsh (Romney: "Freedom requires religion" 12/06/07) both remarked on the strange concept of "secularism" as a religion.

This is a long-time fundamentalist concept, defining absence of religion as a religion in itself. There's a certain authoritarian logic to the argument, as weird as it is in substance. One of the best descriptions I've seen of the thought process behind it is in Chris Hedges' (unfortunately titled) 2007 book, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America.

Hedges talks about how fundamentalist subcultures in America often redefine words so that a commonly-understood word takes on a whole different meaning for them. Political fundamentalist leaders - the term "Christianist" seems to be coming into brader use to describe them - define "religious freedom" as having Protestant Christianity imposed in various ways by the government. They get to this Orwellian usage through the concept that true freedom or liberty is in being "saved" and living in a right relationship to God through Jesus Christ, as understood in their religious circles. So being free means being Christian, so religious freedom is a condition which allows maximum latitude for Christian proseltyzing.

It's related to a concept that even the Federalist Society doesn't seem to buy as a legal notion, but still serves as a useful rhetorical device for Christianists. Christianists argue that everyone has some kind of religion, even atheists and agnostics. Though nonbelievers claim to have no religion, nonbelievers actually practice the religion of "secular humanism". Taking Christian prayer out of schools or other measures by which government takes a non-sectarian stand is actually imposing the religion of secular humanism, in this argument. Therefore enforcing separation of church and state as we know it in the US and other democratic countries is actually a violation of Christians' freedom of religion because it subjects them to a government-imposed religion of secular humanism.

Yes, the notion is cracked. That strange swimming feeling in your head after you try to follow that line of argumentation is one that you start to recognize after digging through it and others like it for a while. But that is the conceptual framework for the Republican fundis to whom Romney is trying to appeal.

It's bad religion and bad politics that make for bad policy. The Christian religion has done exceptionally well in the American competitive free market of religious ideas. And Christian and other religious institutions receive massive government financial subsidies in the form of tax exemptions on contributions to religious institutions.

Intermingling church and state goes both ways, a reality that many fundis today foolishly ignore. It should be a warning to them that it's no longer possible to understand US Middle East policy without knowing the basic outlines of Protestant "premillenial dispensationalist" apocalyptic thinking. Romney mentions apocalyptic beliefs of the Mormon Church in the YouTube video at the beginning of this post that certainly seem to share common elements with the Protestant fundamentalist version, although Protestants don't normally assume that Jesus will rule the world from Independence, Missouri. Having their "eschatological" (end-times) ideas discussed in "the public square", as they like to call it, is not going to enhance public respect for their theology, their judgment or their broader moral sense.

Are they really sure they want fundamentalist theology to be a daily topic of political debate? Mainstream Christians have nothing to fear from such discussions. God presumably doesn't, either. But white fundamentalists might want to think this thing out a little better than they have recently.

Carla Marinucci's article on the speech doesn't emphasize the points that stood out to me, but it has some decent reporting: Romney says his White House bid not defined by Mormon faith San Francisco Chronicle 12/07/07.

Joe Conason's piece linked above includes the useful advice:

Distasteful as all the Bible thumping and ostentatious piety of the Republican presidential aspirants certainly are, the time may have come to address their religious pretensions directly, instead of turning away in mild disgust. For the truth is that no matter how often candidates like Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee promise to uphold the Constitution and protect religious freedom, they are clearly seeking to impose the restrictive tests of faith that the nation's founders abhorred. ...

Phonies like Huckabee and Romney complain constantly about the supposed religious intolerance of secular liberals. But the truth is that liberals -- including agnostics and atheists -- have long been far more tolerant of religious believers in office than the other way around. They helped elect a Southern Baptist named Jimmy Carter to the presidency in 1976, and today they support a Mormon named Harry Reid who is the Senate majority leader -- which makes him the highest-ranking Mormon officeholder in American history. Nobody in the Democratic Party has displayed the slightest prejudice about Reid's religion. (my emphasis)

This is an additional segment from the Romney interview in the YouTube video linked above. This is an earlier portion of the interview. It includes Romney stating his determination to have the courts overturn Roe v. Wade.



Tags: authoritarianism, carla marinucci, christian fundamentalism, christian right, joe conason, romney

A new "press corps" CW on Ron Paul?

The San Francisco Chronicle's Carla Marinucci rarely strays from the conventional wisdom of the Establishment press. So when she writes what is barely more than a puff piece like this on hardline rightwinger Ron Paul, The GOP's Dark Horse? 11/28/07, it strikes me that the GOP-friendly CW of the Beltway press corps is shifting from seeing Paul as an irrelevant "fringe" candidate to an unconventional but lovable long-shot candidate. She only hints at his far-right ideas. His history of actively courting the hardcore, militia-type far right, and their current remarkably united support for him, goes unmentioned. As does his longtime role of acting as an important channel for the "mainstreaming" of radical right ideas into the mainstream Republican Party.

At least she points out his dedication to insuring that rightwing "militia" types have unrestricted access to firearms and ammunition, as well as his hostility to pretty much any measures designed to protect the environment:

Paul's eclectic mix of fiercely libertarian and conservative values has created a passionate support base that might be unlike any other candidate in the 2008 presidential race.

The former practicing obstetrician, who has served in the House about 20 of the past 35 years, is vehemently anti-abortion - voting against federal funding of abortion, stem cell research and even family planning funding in U.S. foreign aid - and strongly pro-gun rights. His views have gained him high ratings from conservatives and groups such as the Christian Coalition and the National Rifle Association. Paul also is seen as strongly anti-environmental by groups such as the League of Conservation Voters, which gave him just a 5 percent legislative rating on his voting record.

But Paul also appeals to progressives on a number of issues: He supports repealing most federal drug laws, including those against medical marijuana, is against the death penalty, vigorously opposes the war in Iraq and is against the Patriot Act and free trade agreements such as NAFTA.

But this is pretty much the spin that the Republicans need to position a third-party Ron Paul run to appeal to conservatives and Republican-leaning independents who are against the Iraq War but are leery of voting from Democrats.

Tags: carla marinucci, ron paul