Morning-After

Pundits Take Winners to Task

Victorious Dems lectured by media establishment

On the day after Election Day 2006, pundits
from major U.S. news outlets had, as one would expect, substantial amounts of
political criticism for the party that faced major losses. What is more
remarkable is the amount of criticism and caution directed at the party that won
major gains.



Virtually unanimously, the political commentators providing the initial analyses
of the election for the nation's most influential news outlets downplayed the
progressive aspects of the victory, characterizing the large new crop of
Democrats as overwhelmingly centrist or even conservative. "These Democrats
that were elected last night are conservative Democrats," declared CBS
News chief Washington correspondent Bob Schieffer (Early Show, 11/8/06). CNN's
Andrea Koppel (American Morning, 11/8/06)
referred to the "new batch of moderate and conservative Democrats just
elected who will force their party to shift towards the center."



"This is not a majority made from cookie-cutter liberals," wrote
Eleanor Clift for Newsweek online (11/8/06).
"Some are pro-life, some pro-gun, some sound so Republican they might be in
the other party if it weren't for President Bush and the Iraq War." This
echoed the thoughts of Fox News' Carl Cameron,
who found among victorious Democrats "many pro lifers, a lot of second
amendment supporters, those who oppose gay marriage and support bans on flag
burning. Things of this nature."



Not that many were "pro-life," actually; NARAL
(11/8/06) counted 20 pro-choice votes among the 28 announced House newcomers.
Does anyone think that incoming class is going to make a Democratic-controlled
house less likely to block new abortion restrictions? And gun control (for
better or worse) hasn't been a serious Democratic priority for more than a
decade. One ideological stance that was actually widespread among the incoming
Democrats, and one that is actually likely to alter Democratic Party priorities,
is an opposition to NAFTA-style trade agreements and an embrace of "fair
trade" principles (Public Citizen,
11/8/06)--but this key trend was little noted by the morning-after pundits,
presumably because such views are considered akin to a belief in leprechauns by
the media establishment (Extra!, 7-8/01). One
exception was the Los Angeles Times editorial
page, which did take notice--and alarm: "Democrats who wooed anxious voters
with sermons about the evils of outsourcing will be reluctant to support freer
trade," the paper editorialized (11/8/06), deeming this development
"bad for the country."



In the Washington Post (11/8/06), Peter Baker
and Jim VandeHei stressed that "party politics will be shaped by the
resurgence of 'Blue Dog' Democrats, who come mainly from the South and from
rural districts in the Midwest and often vote like Republicans. Top Democrats
such as Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.) see these middle-of-the-road lawmakers as the
future of the party in a nation that leans slightly right of center."



It's not surprising that Emanuel would see the world that way, since he's a
centrist himself who has long been trying to push the Democrats to the right.
But the "Blue Dogs" are far from a majority in the new crop of
Representatives (nine, according to the Arkansas
Democrat Gazette, 11/9/06), or in the Democrat's total ranks (44), so
their influence on the party as a whole will be far from overpowering.



What's more, even those "Blue Dogs" are not likely to vote with
Republicans on top Democratic Party issues: A Media
Matters survey found (11/8/06) that all 27 new Democrats whose races had
been called support raising the minimum wage and changing course in Iraq, and
they oppose privatizing Social Security. Media
Matters found only five openly described themselves as
"pro-life."



It’s not just centrist Democrats like Emanuel who are pushing journalists to
take this line: CNN anchor Rick Sanchez posed
a question (11/8/06) to National Journal
writer John Mercurio: "I heard this at least five or six times tonight from
Republicans. They say sure, these Democrats that you've elected tonight are
running as moderates. Some even sound like conservatives. They have crew cuts,
social conservatives, talk about moral issues. When they get to Washington,
they're going to find their leadership is filled with liberals. Is there really
a dysfunction there?"



Conservative New York Times columnist David
Brooks put forth a similar take (11/9/06): "On Tuesday the muscular middle
took control of America. Voters kicked out Republicans but did not swing to the
left." Brooks wrote that Democrats "will have to show they have not
been taken over by their bloggers or their economic nationalists, who will
alienate them from the suburban office park moms."



This supposed conflict between what Clift called "the demands of the
antiwar left" and "the more moderate voices that helped [House
Democrats] win control of the chamber" was a prominent theme. Baker and
VandeHei allowed how "the passion of the antiwar movement helped propel
party ctivists in this election year," but said that "the Democrats'
victory was built on the back of more centrist candidates seizing
Republican-leaning districts."



This assumption that war critics and centrists are two opposing camps is
peculiar, given that 56 percent of exit-polled voters said they opposed the war;
surely they represent the center of opinion, rather than the 42 percent who
expressed support. In any case, opposition to the war was a widespread theme
among the "more centrist candidates" who captured Republican-held
seats (TomPaine.co, 11/8/06).



The pundits' prescription for the Democrats hardly varies (Extra!,
7-8/06), so it was unsurprising to see them urging "bipartisanship"
and a move to the right. "In private talks before the election, Emanuel and
other top Democrats told their members they cannot allow the party's liberal
wing to dominate the agenda next year," Baker and Jim VandeHei reported,
citing the centrist Democrats whose analysis of the election results was nearly
identical with that of media insiders. (Rick Perlstine made a strong case on the
New Republic's website--11/8/06--that Emanuel
had less to do with the Democratic victory than did the netroots that he
despises.)



"The voters, tired of Washington's divisive ways, want to see the two
parties cooperate," wrote Newsweek's
Clift. Oddly, though, those voters had recently told Newsweek (Newsweek.co,
10/21/06) that 51 percent of them wanted impeachment to be a priority (either
high or low) of a new Democratic majority. It's likely that these people, who
wouldn't mind seeing Bush tried for high crimes and misdemeanors, aren't
particularly eager to see the representatives they sent to Washington working
with him to advance his agenda.



One thing that the new Democratic legislature must surely avoid doing, according
to the media analysts, is investigate the old Republican executive: "The
danger is that the campaign of '06 will simply continue under the name of
'government,'" wrote Dick Mayer for CBSNews.com
(11/8/06). "Many Democrats, for example, are dead set on a new round of
aggressive hearings about everything from pre-war intelligence to homeland
security to the hunt for Osama bin Laden. The theater of Grand Congressional
inquisitions is generally an enemy of statesmanship."



It's troubling, to say the least, when people in the journalism profession see
"investigation" and "inquisition" as synonymous. The New
York Times' Robin Toner (11/8/06), who was exceptional in not seeing her
morning-after analysis as an opportunity to scold the Democratic winners, also
stood out in seeing the exercise of Congress' investigatory powers as normal and
perhaps even beneficial; of the Democratic House leaders, she wrote that
"in many ways, their greatest power will be their ability to investigate,
hold hearings and provide the oversight that they asserted was so lacking in
recent years."



Other journalists couldn't resist using their analysis of the Republicans'
political failings as a chance to get in generic smears of the Democrats.
"The outcome brought an end to the Republican Revolution that began in 1994
but lost its way," wrote Michael Duffy and Karen Tumulty for Time.com
(11/8/06), "as the party that came to Washington to cut government spending
and clean up a corrupt institution ran into scandals of its own and found itself
spending like drunken Democrats." Presumably a knowledge of political
history is a job requirement for being a political correspondent at Time;
when Duffy and Tumulty look back on the past 50 years of U.S. administrations,
do they really see it divided into spendthrift Democrats and frugal Republicans?



Suffice it to say that when Newt Gingrich and company swept into power in 1994,
no one in the mainstream media was explaining Democratic losses by saying that
the politicians who came to Washington in 1974 in response to Nixon's corruption
ended up "stealing like Republican crooks."



Tom Brokaw offered a similarly foggy history lesson on election night. "If
the Democrats do very well, will it be a huge philosophical shift? Maybe not,
because a lot of these Democrats ran to the center. They didn't run like they
were running in 1972 again. They ran as more pragmatic public servants this
time."



For the record, the party breakdown of the 93rd Congress (1973-75): 242
Democrats, 192 Republicans.

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