I believe that the victory of truth over truthiness is the most important result of the elections last week. The victory is beautifully documented in Frank Rich’s latest piece in New York Magazine. In my judgment, the defeat of truthiness is even more important than the victory of Barack Obama over Mitt Romney and the victory of the Democratic Party over the Republicans, important though these are. A sound relationship between truth and politics will provide for the possibility of American governability and progress, informed by both progressive and conservative insights.

To be sure, on the issues, foreign and domestic, and on various public policies, the differences between the two presidential candidates and their two parties were stark, clearly apparent now as the parties position themselves for the fiscal cliff. Yet, these differences pail in comparison to the importance of basing our political life on factual truths, (as I analyzed here) instead of convenient fictions (fictoids), and on careful principled (of the left and the right) judgments and not the magical ideological thinking offered by market and religious fundamentalists (as I also previously examined) and by various xenophobes and racists (who promise to take their country back).

Stephen Colbert, the great political philosopher and public intellectual, the leading expert on truthiness, disguised as a late night comic, has most clearly illuminated the truth challenge in his regular reports. His tour de force, in this regard, was his address to the White House press corps in George W. Bush’s presence. But now it no longer takes a brave comic genius to highlight the problem. Republican and conservative responses to election polling and results provide the evidence, both negative and positive.

Though the polls clearly predicted an Obama victory, it is noteworthy that the Republican leaders and their advisers really didn’t see the defeat coming. They operated in an ideological bubble, which facts did not penetrate. Now they must (more on their alternative courses in our next post by Aron Hsiao on Monday).

After all objective reports on election night indicated a decisive Obama victory, Romney wouldn’t concede. Karl Rove on Fox News comically refused to acknowledge what Fox News (Fox News!) projected. Before the election, Republican pollsters systematically distorted their election predictions to confirm their desired results. A fact denying normality had become the order of things. The right-wing politicians, and their media enablers, were not simply lying to the public. They were blinded by their own fabrications. There were the fortunate (from my point of view) miscalculations of the campaign, but when it came to science, to climate change, to biology and much more, fact denying had become deadly. Thankfully, there is now sensible resistance, by the population at large and also by conservatives themselves.

As reported by Jonathan Martin at Politico notable young conservatives are now presenting important criticism. Ross Douthat: “What Republicans did so successfully, starting with critiquing the media and then creating our own outlets, became a bubble onto itself.” Ben Domenech: “The right is suffering from an era of on-demand reality.” Such self-criticism is heartening. Perhaps, it will be possible for serious conservative intellectuals and public figures to present positions without the craziness.

Severely conservative Romney continued his ideologically driven, fact-denying, forty-seven percent ways, blaming his defeat on “free gifts” to Obama’s core constituencies, free birth control to single women in college, health care to African-Americans and Latinos, and a special gift to Latinos — the promise of amnesty to children of illegal aliens, “the so-called Dream Act kids.” In the conservative cocoon at Fox, Bill O’Reilly strongly agreed, but it is very interesting to observe many Republicans running away from the remark. Surely political calculation is involved, but it is also a healthy matter that key conservative figures, such as Bobby Jindal and Chris Christie, are distancing themselves from the ideological fiction of the society made up of takers and makers, as Paul Ryan has put it.

I wonder, thinking ahead to 2014 and 2016, perhaps there will be a Republican civil war, between the ideologues and the conservatives. I have my hopes, but also my concerns. But at least in this election, those who used facts to mobilize their campaign won over the prisoners of fictoids.

I identify with Barack Obama’s political position, as a centrist wanting to move the center left. I identify with the democratic left because of its long and developing progressive tradition, addressing the problems of inequalities based on class, race, religion, gender, nation and sexual orientation, and because of its critique of the injustices of untrammeled capitalism and its conviction that the present order of things can and should be subjected to critique, its conviction that the way things are is not necessarily the way they must be. For these and other substantive reasons, I am very happy with the election results.

But further and in a less partisan way, I understand that alternative political traditions, broadly understood as conservative, are worthy of respect, especially as they illuminate the importance of learning from experience and highlight the limits of reason. I respect this tradition and have learned from it. I think a healthy modern republic should be informed by it. And, for these reasons, I even have sought to find conservative intellectuals worthy of respect at Deliberately Considered, see here and here. It is a terrible loss that fact-denying, right-wing ideology has prevailed in the Republican Party in recent years, amplified by racist currents during the Obama presidency. But perhaps the tide will now change among conservatives.

Conservative thinker, Edmund Burke, and radical icon, Karl Marx, are important thinkers for me as I try to make sense of the political world, but it is the ambiguous and ambivalent commitments and insights of Alexis de Tocqueville and Hannah Arendt that make them my primary political teachers. Tocqueville, the ambivalent democrat, highlighted the dangers of mass society as the underside of democracy. (I should post my thoughts on this one of these days.) Arendt more crucially observed the dangers of ideology and emphasized that a common factual base is the ground upon which democracy is built. I sense that the most significant result of this election is that we are moving back to this ground. I hope Fox News craziness, the right-wing entertainment industry, as David Frum is now describing it, is “so yesterday,” or at least no more intimately connected to the Republicans than the Democrats are tied to MSNBC. I can’t tolerate either as a source of news. It worries me that some think of them as such.

This is how I understand my centrist orientation. My primary political commitment is to a free public life, where people with different identities and principles meet between left and right, i.e. in the center. I don’t’ believe in watered down progressive and conservative positions, but a position where there is informed debate. For me, this is the meaning of “the vital center.” I think this election, as truth prevailed over truthiness, and as a principled leader prevailed over one that pretended to be a true-believer, who had a very problematic relationship with factual truth, provides hope for a centrist with leftist commitments.

When I describe Barack Obama as a principled centrist working to move the center left, I confess, I am seeing in the President’s political orientation my own primary commitments. As a professor, as a participant observer of the opposition to previously existing socialism around the old Soviet bloc, and as an engaged American, this kind of center-left position makes the most sense to me.

I oppose true believers, of the left and the right, and am confused by those who see only their own position as intelligent and insightful, viewing their opposition as, at best, mistaken, and, more likely, as fundamentally mendacious. Working in the academic world, in my daily life, I mostly see this in my leftist colleagues who are certain about the superiority of their own political commitments. On the larger political stage, the fallacy of political certainty seems to be primarily a right-wing disorder, vividly epitomized in the Republican debates and on Fox News. The new direction of MSNBC, I should also note, has become a mirror image of Fox. I find it almost as hard to watch for more than a few minutes.

I look for alternatives to this, and I believe that this is not only a matter of personal taste or my specific political commitments. Hannah Arendt’s essay on truth and politics highlights the depth of the problem, as I have already reflected on here and here. Confusing political opinion with political truth and empowering that truth is a primary cultural characteristic of modern tyranny, and basing politics on factual lies, avoiding factual truth, is another definitive cultural characteristic of the tyranny of our times and of the recent past. For this reason, I am self critical about my own convictions and quite critical of many of my friends on the left, and also for this reason, I am on the look out for opponents on the right worthy of respect, from whom I can learn. Thus, my posts looking for conservatives (here, here and here), and about Corey Robin’s attempt to understand the reactionary mind, and the post by the distinguished and controversial paleo-conservative, Paul Gottfried.

The matter isn’t finished. I hope these posts will be only the opening of contributions about and from the right on the events of the day at Deliberately Considered. “Mario” has agreed to post an answer to the question I posed to him.

He compactly asserted in his comment to one of my recent pieces:

I think you will find that many American conservatives are fundamentally (a) concerned about being able to live in traditional ways — in the ways or manners that they have inherited from their parents and grandparents, and respectful of established societal codes of conduct shared with their neighbors and communities — and, perhaps more importantly, (b) suspicious of any attempt to improve or re-engineer society based on an ill-defined idea of progress or some ideological model of a future utopia. History has shown us repeatedly that such projects usually require the violation of a certain group’s rights — and often lead to bloodshed.

And I asked how these commitments could be applied to considering deliberately the events of the day in a way that might convince people who are not conservative? I actually agree with some of the implications of the two points, but not all of them. Perhaps a real discussion could be opened. Next, I will work on the opening in a response to Paul Gottfried’s post.

The other day someone working for the mainstream media (MSM) seemed to be undecided about how exactly they should disparage a burgeoning movement. First the hypertext link on MSNBC’s website read, “Protesters want to tame Wall Street’s wild ways, but they’re a little wild themselves.” Later in the day it read, “Wall Street protesters spread murky message.” In both cases, clicking on the link would reveal the title of the article, “Familiar refrain: Wall Street protest lacks leaders, clear message,” with the opening lines, “It’s messy. It’s disorganized. At times, the message is all but incoherent.” With the accompanying photos focusing on the disheveled belongings of the protesters scattered about their home base, Liberty Park, the theme was that the seeming lack of organization and consensus of the “Wall Street Protesters” was analogous to the dysfunctional state of American political discourse. Being unsympathetic, skeptical, or even cynical, reporters do find what they’re looking for. Yet such a jaundiced look at the protests, as is typical of much of the media’s coverage, misses something strikingly obvious: what has largely faded in the rest of the country is still alive in Liberty Park– hope and change.

Last week, a young couple from Virginia Beach paid a visit to the park with their two children, one about five or six years old, the other not older than three. They met a young man who was writing a message on a cardboard to protest corporate malfeasance. The couple asked him to explain to their eldest daughter what it was he was protesting about. The young man smiled, and looked at the girl, who shyly averted his glance.  “So basically, a few people have a lot of power, and they’re using that power to take advantage of everybody else.” At that point, the girl began to give the young man her undivided attention.  “You know, it’s like a bully, we’ve all had plenty of bullies in our lives, and they think of different ways to better their position. And what we have is just that, on a larger scale, going on with the ruling class.” He paused and smiled as the girl’s attention seemed to be waning and then sped up his voice as he finished his explanation, at that point perhaps addressing her parents more than her: “And they’re using the socio-economic infra-structure of this company [sic.]to do that.” The girl’s eyes wandered about the park. Still smiling, and probably in jest, the young man adds, “She looks like she totally got it.”

I cannot say that a description such as this necessarily typifies the movement. If I wanted to emulate the MSM, I would say that the vignette was the protest in a tea cup: the girl being the uncomprehending MSM, not ready or willing to receive a message, which is actually being delivered loud and clear. However, the protest is certainly more than the sum of its parts. A closer look reveals that the lack of hierarchy and permanent leadership does not denote disorganization. (In this way, it resembles the protests in North Africa and the Middle East, including Israel.) A lack of a single unified message does not indicate no message at all. The movement is a work in progress; leadership, structure, and consensus are emerging from the bottom up.

The movement has already formed a number of committees which address the needs of the protesters; one of the most recent is a “Let’s Talk it Out Committee” which has the goal of providing counsel for those protesters that are mentally or emotionally stressed. There are also working groups that address concerns such as medical care, sanitation, and community outreach. Then there is the “General Assembly,” a kind of “free-market” of ideas if you will, which has definite procedural rules, and consists of anyone who wishes to have their voice heard. In fact, even one of its most disorganized aspects, its online Chat Room, has rather strict rules: no ideology or political candidates are to become the topic of discussion. The participants want the movement to grow, and realize that in order for that to happen, the movement must be inclusive and without ideological rigidity. Even the police are considered part of “the 99%,” which perhaps more than anything else, is representative of their message: if you make under $250,000 a year and feel your representatives have been bought by elite interests, we are you.

On the sidewalk near Broadway is the “Welcoming Committee.” A few nights ago, I talked to a young women, wearing a shirt that said “I’m here because I love this country,” that had been camping out in the park 24/7. She complained that a local news outlet claimed that the numbers of protesters was “dwindling,” but she was happy to report that they were actually increasing, and that that morning she had woken up surrounded by several hundred others. When I asked her what she thought about the criticism that they are “leaderless,” she told me that when numbers are large there will naturally need to be leaders, but the structure of the movement was “organic” and different leaders took the reins in different situations.

Recently, Cornel West briefly took the reins of leadership, and addressed the General Assembly before they began their discussion.  “There is a sweet spirit in this place,” he began, but stopped as the rest of the assembly repeated his words, as is the procedure when someone addresses them.  “I hope you can feel the love and inspiration…” Again the refrain.  “… as those strong and everyday people…” This time the crowd isn’t so sure about what was said,  and a little laughter can be heard before the crowd tries to repeat what West said, but all that is clear is “everyday people.” West continued, “…take a stand with great courage and passion.

The rest of his speech, minus the refrains, went like this:

“Because we oppose the greed of Wall Street oligarchs, and corporate plutocrats, we free the democratic juices of this country and all the places around the world. I am so blessed to be a part of this. You had me spiritually break dancing all the way here.  Cause when you bring folks together, people of all colors, and all cultures, all genders, all sexual orientations, the elite will tremble in their boots.  And we will send the message, that this is the US fold, responding to the Arab Spring.  And it’s going to hit Chicago, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Arizona, and then on to Detroit. To Appalachia, and to people on reservations for our red brothers and sisters. Martin Luther King Junior will smile from the grave as we move step by step to what he called a revolution- don’t be afraid to say revolution- a transfer of power from the oligarchs to ordinary citizens, for the poor children of all colors, the orphans and the widows, the elderly, and the working folk. We can end the prisoner-industrial complex, the military industrial complex, the Wall Street Oligarchy complex, the corporate media multiplex. I want to thank you.  It’s a blessing to be a small part of this magnificent gathering. This is the General Assembly consecrated by your witness and your body and your mind.”

The refrain this time is drowned out by the cheers of the crowd.

He left and then someone else briefly took the reign of leadership, but with the disclaimer, “Just because there are facilitators, doesn’t mean that they are leaders. We’re in this together, we want to work it out.”

The idea is that the people should lead. In Liberty Park that idea has actually become reality.

I was baffled yesterday when I saw on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports” a short question: “Is President Obama also to blame for US economy?” This question referred to an ongoing Gallup poll. And MSNBC presented the answer – 53% of asked people now blaming Obama for the state of US economy.  This brief episode of my morning TV routine provides an opportunity for me to revisit the larger problem of  the “Power to the Polls,” which I investigated through an article by Jürgen Habermas.  I continue to wonder what do polls actually mean in public debate and opinion?

“Is President Obama also to blame for US economy?” This is a bad polling question on so many levels. I am not really an expert on polling, but even I learned in Germany in my “Empirie” class, during my political science studies, that there is a scientific method to polls and questionnaires. One of the first rules: Questions have to be unambiguous, meaning they should be clearly understood. What does “also” mean? Is Obama to be blamed also among other actors? Is Obama to be blamed for the economy also among other issues for which he is to blame?

I could not believe that a professional researcher from Gallup would come up with such a flawed question. So I actually looked at the Gallup poll to which MSNBC’s interpretation refers.  The Gallup question is: “How much are George W. Bush and Barack Obama to be blamed for US Economy?” The answer choices are split between Bush and Obama and give the options: a great deal, moderate amount, not much, not at all. This poll is ongoing since 2009. The results published on September 21, 2011 show that 53% of the asked people say for Obama either “a great deal” or “moderate amount” (Bush 69 %). This is what MSNBC translates into 53% say “yes” to the question “Is president Obama also to blame for US economy?”

Not only was the MSNBC presentation of the results stilted. There is also something deeply flawed with the Gallup framing of the question. What does “blame” mean? Did Obama do something? Did he not do something? Is he to blame, because he is the president? What does “for US economy” mean? For there being a US economy? For the state of it? For the structure of it? There are so many underlying assumptions packed into one question that the results do not mean anything. That is why MSNBC can use the poll to translate it into whatever works. I bet Fox News has another translation.

As much fun as it is to nitpick polling questions, there is a serious problem for the public sphere, deliberation and the way media understand their role. Polls have power in today’s public debate. They have been elevated from tools to the actual content of opinion. But how can we debate through polls? They are a bad imitation and surrogate for real, informed opinion and debate that should stand at the core of how we critically deliberate about politics and society. Even worse, they stifle debate, because they present results, not opinions that could generate an informed discussion, even an argument.

President Obama offered a critique of Fox News in an interview published in an issue of Rolling Stone.    This absolutely shocked and appalled Fox shock jocks Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity the evening of Obama’s speech at the University of Wisconsin in Madison on Tuesday.  They were shocked by any suggestion that they were anything but “fair and balanced,” providing the alternative to the kowtowing liberals of the mainstream media.  They were appalled by Obama’s criticism.  (link)

Their response is cynical.  They pretend to be what they are not, news commentators on a news network. Obama’s critique on the other hand is on firmer ground, even if it is not clear that it was wise.  Isn’t it below the President’s dignity to engage in polemics with partisan press criticism?  Doesn’t it enlarge them and belittle him?  These are the questions of the talking heads on cable and on the Sunday morning shows.

But actually in the interview Obama was quite careful, offering a measured serious answer to a provocative question:

Rolling Stone: “What do you think of Fox News? Do you think it’s a good institution for America and for democracy?”

President Obama: “[Laughs] Look, as president, I swore to uphold the Constitution, and part of that Constitution is a free press. We’ve got a tradition in this country of a press that oftentimes is opinionated. The golden age of an objective press was a pretty narrow span of time in our history. Before that, you had folks like Hearst who used their newspapers very intentionally to promote their viewpoints. I think Fox is part of that tradition — it is part of the tradition that has a very clear, undeniable point of view. It’s a point of view that I disagree with. It’s a point of view that I think is ultimately destructive for the long-term growth of a country that has a vibrant middle class and is competitive in the world. But as an economic enterprise, it’s been wildly successful. And I suspect that if you ask Mr. Murdoch what his number-one concern is, it’s that Fox is very successful.”

Obama placed Fox in a tradition of opinionated American journalism, and noted he disagreed with the Fox opinions and doesn’t think they are good for America.  While I don’t see how a reasonable person, either pro or anti-Obama, can find fault with his response, I also don’t think that Obama went far enough.  Serious media innovation is occurring at Fox, with potentially deep political effects.  It is probably the reason why Obama feels compelled to criticize it from time to time.

Fox News is a truly innovative media form, particularly for television.  It purports to present news, but actually it is in the business of political mobilization.

In the case of the Tea Party protests, this is most clearly the case.  Glenn Beck announces a mass demonstration, the 9/12 rally.  On the Fox News programs and discussion shows, the developments leading up to the demonstration are reported, and their significance is discussed.  Together with Beck’s agitation for the event, these reports and discussions bring the planned event to the attention of a large audience.  Even if the event was initially the result of grassroots organization, as were the Tea Party Protests called for “tax day,” April 15, 2009, the attention of the public to the event now goes well beyond its original planners and their capacity to mobilize the population.

The French media theorist and sociologist, and my friend, Daniel Dayan, who I hope will join us in a future post, highlights the importance of this showing in his work on “monstration. ” In his research he is particularly interested in how the experience and expressions of a particular social circle moves beyond a delimited public, and is brought to the attention of a broader public.  This act is of primary political significance in media politics, something Fox has done very well, helping the previously marginal to become part of the mainstream.

Then the event happens.  Fox is there giving it full coverage. It is the major event of the day, the story that is given wall to wall coverage, while the other news sources tend to report it as one story among many.  The fact that only Fox “properly” reports on the event is said to reveal the bias of the “lame stream media,” to use the language of the American media critic and Fox commentator, Sarah Palin.  The format applies to major happenings, but also to the trivial, from the Islamic bias of textbooks in Texas, to the booing of Palin’s daughter Bristol on “Dancing with the Stars.”

Fox is not just biased as it reports the news.  It produces the news from beginning to end.  Its competitors in broadcast and cable journalism may lean left, MSNBC, or center, CNN, but they are not in the news making business in the same sense as Fox, and to a greater extent, its parent company, News Corporation.

To be sure, this form of media organization makes money.  Murdock’s number one concern may be to be successful, as President Obama maintained in Rolling Stone, but it is notable that the success is political as well as monetary.  Rupert Murdock and News Corp makes money, while America is given a strong coordinated push to the right.

Barack Obama gave a campaign speech yesterday on the campus of the University of Wisconsin which was largely absent from last night’s newscast. (link) Now, I will take a closer look at the content of his speech.

Obama made his points cogently, identifying the problem and the obstacles:

Think about it, when I arrived in Washington 20 months ago, my hope and my expectation was that we could pull together, all of us as Americans — Democrats and Republicans and independents — to confront the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. I hoped and expected that we could get beyond some of the old political divides between Democrats and Republicans, blue states and red states, that had prevented us from making progress for so long because although we are proud to be Democrats, we are prouder to be Americans.
Instead, what we found when we arrived in Washington was the rawest kind of politics. What we confronted was an opposition party that was still stuck on the same failed policies of the past…

He criticized the opposition:

Understand, for the last decade, the Republicans in Washington subscribed to a very simple philosophy – you cut taxes mostly for millionaires and billionaires…You cut regulations for special interests, whether it’s the banks or the oil companies or health insurance companies. Let them write their own rules. You cut back on investments in education and clean energy and research and technology.

So basically the idea was if you just put blind faith in the market, if we let corporations play by their own rules, if we leave everybody else to fend for themselves, then America would automatically grow and prosper. But that philosophy failed…

He highlighted Democratic accomplishments

And over the last 20 months — over the last 20 months, we’ve made progress… We’re no longer facing the possibility of a second depression — and I have to say, Wisconsin, that was a very real possibility when I was sworn in. We had about six months where the economy was teetering on the edge, and we could have plunged into a second depression.
Now the economy is growing again. Now the private sector has created jobs for the last eight months in a row. There are about 3 million Americans who wouldn’t be working today if not for the economic plan that we put into place. Those are facts.

To rebuild this economy on a stronger foundation, we passed Wall Street reform to make sure that a crisis like this never happens again, so that these reforms are going to end the era of taxpayer-funded bailouts forever –reforms that will stop mortgage lenders from taking advantage of homeowners, reforms that’ll stop credit card companies from hitting you with hidden fees or jacking up your rates without any reason.

But we didn’t stop there. We started investing again in American research and American technology and homegrown American clean energy because I don’t want solar panels and wind turbines and electric cars of the future built in Europe or Asia. I want them built right here in the United States of America with American workers.

To help middle-class families get ahead, we passed a tax cut for 95 percent of working families. I want to repeat that: We cut taxes for 95 percent of working families, because if you were listening to the other side, you’d think we raised taxes.

But, again, we deal in facts. And the fact is, we cut taxes for 95 percent of working families. We passed 16 different tax cuts for America’s small business owners, who create the majority of jobs in this country. We passed health care reform that will stop insurance companies from denying you coverage or dropping your coverage because you’re sick.

And he was sure to link his specific audience, young people, to his programs and policies:

And by the way, Madison, let me just see a show of hands, how many people are under the age of 26 in this crowd? Every single one of you, when you get out of college, if you have not found a job that offers you health care, you’re going to be able to stay on your parents’ health care until you’re 26 years old, so you don’t end up taking the risk of getting sick and being bankrupt.

We finally fixed the student loan system so that tens of billions of dollars — tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies that were going to big banks, they were acting as middlemen, and the student loan programs were going through these financial intermediaries. They were taking billions of dollars of profits. We said, well, let’s cut out the middleman. We’ll give the loans directly to students and that means million more students are going to be able to take advantage of grants and student loans.

And by the way, we also kept a promise I made on the day that I announced my candidacy. We have removed combat troops from Iraq and we have ended our combat mission in Iraq.

But he also did not shy away from the challenges and limitations:

We have made progress over the last 20 months. And that is the progress that you worked so hard for in 2008. Now, we didn’t get everything done. Sometimes people say, well, you know, this item is not done and that idea — well, I’ve only been here two years, guys. If you look at the checklist, we’ve already covered about 70 percent, so I figured I needed to have something to do for the next couple of years.

Linking their stories and his to the issues involved:

I believe in an America that gave my grandfather the chance to go to college because of the GI Bill. I believe in an America that gave my grandparents the chance to buy a home because of the Federal Housing Authority. I believe in an America that gave their children and grandchildren the chance to fulfill our dreams thanks to scholarships and student loans like some of you are on. That’s the America I know. That’s the choice in this election.

Obama, of course, told the story of the last two years from his partisan point of view.  He celebrated the Democrats’ accomplishments, criticized the Republicans because they obstructed his attempts to address the pressing problems of the day, and he further criticized, even ridiculed, the alternatives they proposed as old and warn out, actually the policies that created the financial and economic crises.  He outlined the clear choice and linked his audience’s hopes and dreams to the choice he was presenting.

This is Obama the politician, not the Chief Executive.  He was doing politics, not governing.  But shouldn’t the news take note of this turn?  Shouldn’t they contrast his account of the last two years with the Republicans account?  Shouldn’t they analyze what each side is now proposing, including the way they propose it?

That the 24/7 news, of the left, right and the center, did not devote the air time to the forty-five minute speech indicates their interpretive frame for politics.  In fact, between the Republicans proposal of a Contract with America and the Democrats legislative accomplishments and direction, which Obama highlighted in Madison, there is a real substantive, Tocqueville might define it as big, principled politics going on.  Yet the media reports small.

Perhaps the difference between my students and me on politics in the United States (link) is that they accurately depicted the way the media reports, while I am responding to the parts of the political performance that often stands outside the cable news frame, but nonetheless is highly consequential in the long run.  In cable news frame, the commentary does not illuminate the alternative political principles and philosophies, the alternative marshaling of evidence to support the competing political positions, nor provide a guide for understanding the cogency of the alternatives.  It just works from preconceived ideas.  It misinforms, overlooking the fact that there is serious big politics now going on.

When I went to the television to watch the speech, I was surprised to see that only CNN was broadcasting it, and even they cut it. They skipped the opening remarks when the President thanked the notables present (significantly including Russ Feingold who was missing from Obama’s last full throated partisan address in Milwaukee on Labor Day), and broke off from Obama after about fifteen minutes into the speech so that their regular talking heads could analyze his remarks and the latest political gossip, proceeding with their usual nightly opposing talking point exchanges. I quickly ran to my computer to watch the remainder of the speech, which I found to be an impassioned and reasoned account of why it is important to vote for the Democrats in the upcoming elections.

Transcript

I was surprised the speech wasn’t covered by the news programs. I guess it was deemed to be too partisan, but it was strange. Fox was going on about why Obama is obsessed with them, celebrating the fact that a President has made negative remarks about their one-sided coverage. MSNBC commentators were continuing to fight last summer’s intra-party battles, exploring how the President had not adequately confronted Republicans, caving into Lieberman on the public option before it was necessary, getting less on healthcare as a result, and CNN turned to a Republican operative to balance the President’s partisan remarks. Instead of highlighting the political position of the President, as he carefully presented it to his supporters, the politics of the day was reduced to endless bickering from three different political angles.