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Reinforcing the Talking Points

Posted By Matt On 26th April 2005 @ 17:08 In Politics, Media Criticism, Best Posts | No Comments

I know that I’m helplessly late, in blog-time, to be commenting on this (blog-time moves three-times faster than the hands on Big Ben — the morning’s news is already stale by evening), but I was appalled by how many GOP talking points were reinforced in Matt Bai’s lead story in the New York Times Magazine last Sunday. Titled Democratic Moral Values?, the piece detailed the plight of that lovable, but hopelessly befuddled Democratic Party.

Disguised as a “where we need to go from here” piece that discusses Democratic reactions to the Shiavo case, the article echoed many criticisms of Democrats made by Republicans. It’s the kind of thing that drives me absolutely crazy, because it silently and insidiously transforms partisan insult into collective wisdom. We saw this happen when the Bush campaign branded Kerry as a flip-flopper, and the MSM helped make that label stick by incorporating it as an assumption.

You can forgive Democrats in Washington for feeling somewhat vindicated by the way the controversy over Terri Schiavo played out. For years, after all, they waited in vain for the moment when Republicans might trip over their own arrogance while crusading for moral values, and finally, if polls are to be believed, it happened. [snip]

And yet, satisfying as it was for Democrats to watch Bill Frist and George W. Bush grow mute in the face of voter unease, they couldn’t escape from the fact that the Schiavo episode exposed something hollow in their party too. Far from having made a compelling case for euthanasia or against morality by fiat, Democrats, with a few notable exceptions, pretty much became bystanders to the whole unseemly affair.

In truth, most liberal commentators, such as Kos, approved of Harry Reid’s strategy. The Democrats saw that they were backed into a corner. If they had stepped forward to fight the GOP, they would have been branded as the “party of death.” By stepping aside when the GOP expected them to play the straw man, the Democrats gave Republicans the open ground they needed to trip over their own feet.

For some, of course, no confrontation is complete until defeat is snatched from the jaws of victory, which is why we end up with dreck like this:

And while Republicans managed to further define themselves as a party that would even go to unpopular lengths to defend the sanctity of ravaged and unborn souls alike, Democrats were again left to ponder their own identity in an age in which religious values and scientific insight seem increasingly to be hurtling toward collision. Even in defeat, Republicans emerged as ‘’the party of life.'’ And as one leading Democratic operative privately warned a roomful of allies, ‘’We can’t just be the party of death.'’

Funny, but as I remember the incident, Republicans emerged as “the party making veiled threats against the judicial system,” while Democrats emerged as “the party that defends the system of government laid out in the Constitution.” But I guess I was wrong.

There was something useful in each of these prescriptions, and yet each also sounded a little wishful; it’s not easy to imagine most Democrats credibly sermonizing, any more than it is to envision Southern congregations shouting hallelujahs at the mention of block grants.

Want to know why “it’s not easy to imagine most Democrats credibly sermonizing”? Because journalists like Matt Bai have helped misrepresent Democrats as godless pols pandering for votes in whatever churches will tolerate them. Doesn’t Bai realize that his words and Wolf Blitzer’s slurs on Paul Begala’s Catholic faith are of a piece?

What Republicans have managed to do is to dress up their particular brand of moral tyranny as a defense of life and piety in all its forms. The Democratic alternative, relying as it does on the moral judgments of Ph.D.’s and Oscar winners, subscribes to no such pretension. It simply smacks of boundless elitism.

Bai’s criticisms of the Democratic Party so closely echo Republican criticisms of the Democratic party that it simply smacks of the usual GOP talking points, dressed up as journalistic analysis. But that’s nothing new, is it?