All these years I have wandered in the darkness, lost and frustrated, and tonight, before my eyes, a light has appeared in the woods. That light is known to us mortals as Patrick J. Buchanan.
The war the right lives for, against the people the right truly loathes--the liberal media elite who savagely "Bork" every true conservative who gets on the path to national power--has been reignited. Positive polarization has been achieved.
I admit my new Papa Bear is a bit behind-the-curve on a few topics, I can't agree with him when he calls Barack Obama's March 18, 2008 speech on race "the same old shakedown" that "black hustlers use". But when it comes to winner-take-all politics, he knows what he's talking about.
Buchanan wrote the famous speech given by Spiro Agnew in 1969; he described television network commentators as biased and an "unelected elite". And so a useful plank was born.
As Michael Brendan Dougherty talks Republican strategy in another enlightening post,this one on the website for The American Conservative, "No candidate is ever going to 'make us feel different about one another'. But one candidate usually reminds us of how we really do feel about one another. And that candidate usually wins".
Positive polarization. The Sarah Palin saga has worked to this end perfectly. Maybe it was a Republican operative who planted the post that ignited all this; the one suggesting that Sarah Palin's baby was actually her daughter's. Why not?
The "attacks" on Palin have allowed her to avoid the media, lest they lead her into the broom closet and rip her limb from limb.
The reaction of Republicans has also, according to New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, served to "sort of brush [the press] back, maybe set narrower limits on what we write about."
Not to say that the "media bias" is invented. The perception of media bias is real too. According to a study by American Journalism Review in 2004, only 39 percent of respondents thought the news media tried to report without bias.
David Broder described how it happens from a journalist's point-of-view:
"I often thought, as I saw Romney [George Romney, Republican presidential candidate, 1968, father of Mitt Romney] during the presidential campaign, surrounded by our circle [the press] - men a generation younger than he, many of us with cigarettes in our mouths, drinks in our hands, cynicism in our hearts - that he must have felt as helpless with us as I would feel if my fate or future as a journalist were being decided by a committee of Romney's colleagues among the elders of the Mormon Church."
I wonder if Chris Matthews can skin a moose, I know he'd never make it on an oil rig or be able to clean and filet a chinook.
And the Republicans surely knew when they picked her that the press would jump all over Palin, dig up some relatively minor scandals from her past, question her experience and all of it could easily be used to energize their base: "Come out. Fight with us. End the terrible oppression of the eternally suffering Republican Party!"
In the end, I guess I've learned that men who worked for Richard Nixon know how to play this game. And when politicians start talking about "media bias" again, I'll always think of Patrick J. Buchanan, chuckling and saying under his breath, "I taught them that".
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