On Letting Your Adversaries Define You
The media would like the American right to be represented by the likes of Bob Dole and John McCain, decent old sticks who know how to give dignified concession speeches. Last time round, we went along with their recommendation. If you want to get rave reviews for losing gracefully, that’s the way to go. If you want to win, look at whom the Democrats and their media chums are so frantic to destroy: That’s the better guide to what they’re really worried about.
Ah yes, Republican primary voters didn’t choose John McCain because he appealed to them most among the candidates — they cast their votes for him because they went along with the media’s recommendation. Instead, they should’ve voted for the guy the Democrats and left-friendly media most wanted to destroy — so basically, Tom Tancredo versus Barack Obama would’ve been the best bet, by Mark Steyn’s logic. Who does the media most want to destroy prior to 2012? I’m guessing it’s Sarah Palin. Does anyone want to bet on how her nomination would work out for the right?
Sure. She’d lose, and then conservatives would blame the media for her victory in the primary and her loss in the general, at the same time that they turned 180 degrees about-face and tried to say that she was never a real conservative at all (and that they had been saying this all along.) Conservativism can never fail, after all; it can only be failed.
— Chet · Sep 29, 05:15 AM · #
i agree with the gist of your post but the phrase “Republican primary voters” is slightly misleading as my understanding is that McCain did best in open primaries. the real disjuncture seemed to have been between grassroots support for Huckabee and elite support for Romney, with McCain very narrowly sneaking in between them. nonetheless, point taken, Huckabee would have lost the general by 1964 margins. i’m mostly pointing out that the median voter theorem gave somewhat accurate predictions, but did so despite, not because of, the party’s strategizing
— gabriel Rossman · Sep 29, 10:00 AM · #
What type of candidate do you think would do well?
— mike farmer · Sep 29, 11:07 AM · #
What type of candidate does Conor think would do well? Barack Obama, the candidate he voted for last time. Perhaps Obama can be cloned so we can have an election more to Conor’s rarified tastes than any actually-existing election is otherwise likely to be.
— TRB · Sep 29, 12:05 PM · #
>>>What type of candidate does Conor think would do well?
Perhaps Mitt Romney, if he ran on his record as an executive, including his tenure as governor of Massachusetts, rather than posing (quite ridiculously) as some sort of populist firebrand.
— kth · Sep 29, 12:14 PM · #
I am a Republican primary voter in New Jersey. It was obvious that any Republican candidate was likely to struggle in the best of circumstances. That Big Media would be gunning against any Republican was a given. Therefore I picked McCain as the candidate least likely to catch flak not because he was the best fit to my views (That would be Romney I think.) In hindsight that was a tactical error. Unfortunately McCain ran a tepid campaign and failed to respond to events at a crucial juncture. Say what you will about Palin but he would have lost by an even bigger margin without her.
Palin herself is too much of a flake to succeed in 2012 but Steyn’s point is that Republicans win when they energetically espouse Republican values not when they mute them to please some constituency which won’t vote for them no matter what.
That doesn’t mean the GOP has to find a Palin clone. They can and should try to appeal to newer constituencies than the traditional base but who will make that happen? Like it or not, a Glenn Beck is more likely to achieve this than a Conor Friesdorf.
— Jaldhar · Sep 29, 01:48 PM · #
s/Friesdorf/Friedersdorf/ sorry.
— Jaldhar · Sep 29, 01:52 PM · #
Because who could forget the great anti-Tancredo media juggernaut of 2008? I think the media figured Tancredo could just as well destroy himself and that they didn’t need to bother.
I do of course remember the great anti-Palin juggernaut, which succeeded not because of any attacks on her actual record, but on bizarre fabrications and misrepresentations. Palin’s inability to defend herself and her comical weakness during interviews were also decisive. But at any rate, her actual politics played little part in the success of her destruction, so I’m not sure what Conor’s point is. Don’t be an appealing vector for conservative ideas or the media will take you down? I think an appealing vector who could also better withstand hostility would be great for 2012 and would still meet Steyn’s dictum that you not let the opposition define you. Does Conor disagree?
Also, see Gabriel’s post above on why McCain was nominated: not because of any groundswell of support, but because in an inchoate and fractured Republican primary he emerged as the lesser evil. I don’t think Steyn was saying that primary voters took the media’s advice on who to nominate, but that they behaved as though they did, and that a lot of commentators supported McCain’s nomination for the reasons he outlines.
Also, considering Conor’s recent interest in civility on the right, how could he not note that the main point of Steyn’s post concerned civility on the left?
— Blar · Sep 29, 02:07 PM · #
Yes, Katie Couric destroyed Sarah Palin by asking her what she reads. So vicious, so calculated. Palin didn’t stand a chance against a juggernaut like that. Poor Mark Steyn, perpetual victim of the liberal media.
— tgb1000 · Sep 29, 02:26 PM · #
“They can and should try to appeal to newer constituencies than the traditional base but who will make that happen? Like it or not, a Glenn Beck is more likely to achieve this than a Conor Friesdorf.”
Uh, Beck is only appealing to the exact same folks the GOP has been appealing to for the last 30+ years. He’s being a bit more effective at it right now because he’s playing more on faux populism than doctrinaire conservatism, but he’s aiming right at the same “angry white male and the women who love them” demographic. However, the fact that Beck is a stubbed toe away from a total psychotic breakdown somewhat limits his reach as a political/cultural figure.
Mike
— MBunge · Sep 29, 02:40 PM · #
Isn’t Steyn’s advice to look at whoever the media and Democrats are attacking just another way of letting your adversary define you? Supporting someone just because the other side hates them is how the Democratic Party found itself at rock bottom after the Clinton years.
Mike
— MBunge · Sep 29, 02:45 PM · #
These feudlets are entirely pointless and wholly boring.
— Adam Greenwood · Sep 29, 02:48 PM · #
Uh, Connor, you’re off by a year or so. The media wanted to destroy Sarah Palin during the election, right after her nomination caused a massive increase in McCain’s popularity. Now, she happened to be very destroyable. But she was clearly a danger to an Obama presidency at the time.
— Andrew Berman · Sep 29, 03:05 PM · #
What an amazing piece of revisionist history. The only reason Palin wasn’t thrown off the ticket when it became obvious what a bonehead she was was because of the media’s protection and circumspection of her various and sundry faults.
Sure, the comedians attacked – because her candidacy was risible.
— Chet · Sep 29, 03:53 PM · #
Seriously. The GOP lost not because they put forth a cabal of candidates who essentially promenaded around trying to out do each other in jingoistic toughness and claim the mantle of carrying on George Bush’s legacy, until it became fairly obvious that the country had had enough of George Bush’s policies, upon which they all tried to perform the inexplicable distance and not distance themselves from him. No, the GOP lost because the bad old leftist media told the GOP who to vote for? Give me a break. Seriously, you want us to believe the evil New York Times told you to vote for McCain and you did?
Please. You lost because you deserved to. You lost because the nation grew tired of the Rovian bullshit, the Cheney paranoia and the Bush incompetence. In the same sense that if the nation perceives that Obama is doing nothing but shoveling shit he’ll lose in 2012, not because The Washington Times, National Review and Glenn Beck tell us so.
And the meme that the media took Sarah Palin down is just as ridiculous. The woman shouldn’t be an elected dog catcher, you know it, I know it, everyone knows it, she burned herself with her own level of incompetence. The fact that the media smelled blood in the water and frenzied is nothing new, they got a big ole boner over the Clinton/race snafu as well and would have loved to have taken Obama down had he screwed up. Truth is he didn’t, he ran a great race, he rode to power on what a majority of Americans were feeling and wanting to hear from an elected leader at that time and place.
You don’t like it, that’s fine, no one says your suppose to, but man up and at least admit you had a crappy man in office for President, a scary dude running a secret government as vice president, and a bunch of Senators and Representatives drunk on their own power who screwed your chances for ’08 and possibly ’12. You can’t blame the media for that. Man, talk about your Jungian shadows.
And yes, the same very well might happen to the Democrats, at least the Senators and Representatives drunk on their own power and corrupting themselves like Tammany Hall, in which case the pendulum will swing the other way, the GOP will return to the majority and the same shit will cycle.
— RIRedinPA · Sep 29, 04:33 PM · #
“The woman shouldn’t be an elected dog catcher, you know it, I know it, everyone knows it, she burned herself with her own level of incompetence.”
In fairness to Palin, there’s probably a lot of governors, Congressmen and even Senators who would look like utter fools if they were thrown into the glare of a Presidential campaign with zero preparation. Heck, didn’t the Bush braintrust spend months schooling George W. before his campaign and he was still just barely passable.
Mike
— MBunge · Sep 29, 04:39 PM · #
@MBunge
Agreed.
What’s her excuse now, especially when she is playing on her own terms? Lipstick on a pig comes to mind. Which just supports the notion that the GOP got what they deserved, they threw an academic lightweight who couldn’t hold her own in a Presidential race, even if she had months of prep, out there for the singular reason that she had some evangelical bonafides which McCain lacked.
And when the glaring mistake became evident they left her out to dry. I do give her credit for being able to read tea leaves, she knows she hits a chord to a certain segment of the population (and gives a boner to some of them) who will ignore all her shortcomings cause she prays and is folksy. I would have gone “rogue” as well. That candle burns hot and fast and I don’t blame her for cashing in.
Regardless, doesn’t change her competence or lend support to the meme that “the media made us do it…”
Cheers
— RIRedinPA · Sep 29, 05:24 PM · #
Palin was condescended to my the media from the first interview, with that wanker from ABC or whatever literally looking down his nose at her. Couric again was snide and condescending. If someone asked me what I read in the tone Couric did, I would have been just as flippant as Palin. You can say that Palin didn’t play the game correctly, but she reacted as a normal person. That’s why I would vote for her in a minute.
— stari_momak · Sep 29, 05:41 PM · #
I’ll grant that a conservative might be partially justified in resenting Couric’s treatment of Palin: the thing had somewhat of a high school mean girl air to it, whereby the rich popular girls gang up on the pretty arriviste from the wrong side of the tracks. But hating Katie Couric (and/or Charlie Gibson, with less justification imho) is a really bad reason for casting a presidential vote.
— kth · Sep 29, 05:57 PM · #
The wanker in question is Charlie Gibson and if you’re running for the Vice Presidency of the United States and have been awake for the last decade and have no f’in idea what the Bush Doctrine is then sorry, you get to be condescended upon and no, you don’t get to be a heartbeat away from a hand on the nuclear trigger.
I didn’t say she didn’t play the game correctly, I implied she should have never been in the game to begin with and by McCain pulling a bullshit move as offering her the position then he deserved to lose and the GOP deserves to be out of power.
It’s depressing to think that there are millions of other folks out there like you who want the President to be average at best. We should set the bar a tad higher, no?
— RIRedinPA · Sep 29, 06:02 PM · #
@kth
Thing is Palin has been the pretty popular girl all her life. Sure Couric was piling on but had Palin been qualified she would have been able to handle that interview and out witted Couric. Now if you can’t handle Katie Couric in a interview which you pretty much know what is going to be asked of you how could you be expected to handle more nefarious and cunning international characters like Ahdminijad or the House of Saud or Putin?
And we tangented a bit here, let’s return to discussing how exactly Katie Couric forced conservatives to vote for John McCain over say Tancredo or Huckabee, thereby obviously costing them the election.
— RIRedinPA · Sep 29, 06:12 PM · #
Wow, conservatives sure do assign a lot of power to mean old Katie Couric. But yes, “Where do you get your news?” is terribly condescending. It implied that she followed the news, when it should have been obvious she didn’t. I hope conservative candidates in the future take heed and just stay with FOX. They’re bigger and more influential anyway. (But none of this still explains how the evil mainstream media manipulated Republican primary voters into selecting McCain. And why did they not do the same in 2000?)
— tgb1000 · Sep 29, 07:28 PM · #
OR we can focus on what the Mark Steyn quote actually says: “The media would like the American right to be represented by the likes of Bob Dole and John McCain.” Notice, despite what Mr. Friedersdorf thinks it says, it does not say that the media forced the Republican Party to vote for John McCain. It is that the Republican Party voted for John McCain (the darling of the media up until the Presidential election against the new darling, who is now the POTUS), and the media was happy with the outcome. The media did not attack Rep. Tancredo, because as Mr. Friedersdorf, and the left-leaning media knew, Rep. Tancredo was not a threat. If Mr. Friedersdorf wants to be taken seriously, he should refrain from such sarcastic and unhelpful remarks.
— Kevin H · Sep 29, 08:20 PM · #
“The media would like the American right to be represented by the likes of Bob Dole and John McCain.”
Uh, the media loves for the American right to be represented by Rush, Beck and Palin. Who do you think gets them better ratings, the Holy Trio or Dole and McCain?
Mike
— MBunge · Sep 29, 08:49 PM · #
>>>Thing is Palin has been the pretty popular girl all her life.
Palin was your basic Hooterville homecoming queen. Whereas the Wikipedia tells me that Kate Couric was a Tri-Delt at UVa. No way Sarah Palin gets in that sorority at that college with her background, no matter how pretty she was.
I don’t have the objection to the Couric interview that her fans do, because the upshot was that we found that Sarah Palin is not ready to be President of the United States (not to say that she never will be). But there was a status angle to Couric’s dissection of Palin that was regrettable even though the result wasn’t.
— kth · Sep 29, 10:29 PM · #
Right, poor powerless Palin, only the governor of Alaska and all. If only she’d been a Tri-Delt, why, then she might have had some status!
— Chet · Sep 30, 12:08 AM · #
Mark Steyn is right. Draft Dan Quayle. They hated him!
— T.B.Root · Sep 30, 01:46 AM · #
C’mon, 2008 really wasn’t that long ago so that it’s lost in the mists of time. What happened was that McCain happened to a bunch of winner take all primaries while his rivals happened to win most of the proportional primaries. McCain’s wrapping up the nomination on February 5, 2008 was sheer dumb luck.
— Steve Sailer · Sep 30, 02:47 AM · #
“McCain’s wrapping up the nomination on February 5, 2008 was sheer dumb luck.”
Except none of the other candidates looked like they would have beaten McCain regardless of the primary set up. Corporate America loathed Huckabee with a passion. Measured on a dollars spent per vote won, Romney was one of the worst candidates in political history. Rudy really was “a noun, a verb and 9/11”. It might have dragged on a bit longer, but who in that field was going to beat McCain in a head-to-head match up?
Mike
— MBunge · Sep 30, 02:31 PM · #
Well. I buy the “sheer dumb luck” theory a lot more than the “the liberal media manipulated Republicans into voting for McCain because they knew they could then manipulate the general voting public into voting for Obama” theory.
— tgb1000 · Sep 30, 03:04 PM · #
The media don’t so much “want to destroy” Republican candidates as simply cover them destroying themselves.
If all it would take to nominate Palin in 2012 was, say, an additional $10 million, I’m sure the DNC would be happy to provide that.
— Jim · Oct 1, 03:31 AM · #
I was for John McCain from day 1 but that does not take away the fact that he was a media darling for attacking the Republicans. Doles and McCains lose. Where are your moderate winners? Oh yes, no Eisenhower. Since you were born. Bush 1 ran as Reagan. Where is Pawlenty, Pence? And Palin hatred is common on the tony right but does not yet have a valid basis.
— jjv · Oct 3, 04:23 PM · #